The first author conducted structured interviews with designers, and informal interviews with designers and knitting machine technicians working in the British knitwear industry, as well as design students and design teachers at De Montfort University (formerly Leicester Polytechnic), and CAD software developers at three of the four major producers of CAD systems for flat bed knitting machines (Eckert and Murray, 1993). The interviews provided detailed but informal information about working practices at a small sample of knitwear companies, biased towards the largest companies because these are the primary users of new knitting machine technology, plus information about many other companies where designers or technicians had worked previously or had friends. Some further information about commercial working practices comes from the completed questionnaires we have received from the senior designers working at about 20 of about 75 British knitwear companies we were able to identify. In consequence we have confidence that our general statements about employment practices in the industry have very few exceptions; knitwear companies vary much more in the organisational aspects of their working practices. The first author attended courses in knitwear design at De Montfort University, thus gaining a detailed first hand knowledge of their curricula and teaching methods, as well as information about the attitudes of both students and teachers.

3. The Knitwear Design Process

Knitwear design is a process and a profession distinct from fashion design, which makes use of the output of textile design, and is principally about designing exact shapes. By contrast knitwear design involves the creation of the knitted fabric itself as an integral part of the design of a garment, in which precise shaping is usually less important (because knitted fabric is much more stretchable than woven fabric). (The other major division of clothing design is contour design, which covers underwear and swimwear.)

The workers in the knitwear industry are divided into several very different groups performing different roles, recruited in different ways from different social groups. The development of garments to the stage where they can be mass produced is a collaborative effort between designers, technicians and sampling make-up staff (Eckert and Murray, 1993). In order to explain the use of CAD systems and the roles of the different groups, we describe this process for a typical company large enough to afford CAD systems; there is considerable variation in working practices.

1)     Research. This is the term given to absorbing ideas (from other people's garments or the outside world), and learning about the ideas, topics, colours and features "in fashion" for the coming season. In cognitive science terms, this constitutes the construction of a search space for the design of a garment. The degree of scope the designer has varies greatly; sometimes the designer's brief is to copy someone else's garment making the minimum number of changes to evade the copyright laws. Constraints on the design come from human anatomy, the needs of the target customer, and the intended price.

2)     Designing. This is the development of a detailed design for a garment. It usually proceeds by the designer making successive modifications to the design of a previous garment (her own or someone else's), either with sketches on paper or in her imagination. (Designers in all fields including knitwear divide into two types: visualisers who use drawings only for communication, and drawers who use sketches to represent their ideas as they develop them (Waddell, 1992).) Designers communicate their ideas with sketches, swatches or verbal descriptions of differences from other garments. (A swatch is a piece of knitted fabric produced as an example). Designs for stitch structures are sketched or knitted by the designer by hand or with a manual machine. (A stitch structure is a combination of stitches that make up a pattern, comprising a certain number of rows and columns, which may then be repeated.) At this point a decision is made about whether to work the design out in detail and produce samples. Garments using only simple stitch structures can be worked out completely on paper without involving technicians, but garments with more complex stitch structures can only be designed in detail (sensibly) in collaboration with the technicians. Designers work on their own, even when they have colleagues, and usually under time pressure, which is sometimes intense.

3)  Entering Jacquards. This is the programming of a stitch structure in the programming formalism of a particular knitting machine. This is typically the transfer of a design on paper, but simple stitch structures can programmed directly. When they are programmed they are called Jacquards. (The term originally meant a specific type of multi-colour pattern, by analogy to Jacquard looms.) Who does this depends on the company: sometimes the designer and sometimes the technician; a few companies employ someone specially to enter Jacquards. If a design for a stitch structure is selected for further development, the technician has to knit the fabric on a power machine with the intended yarn to determine the height and width of the pattern in real life, before its placing on the shape can be worked out in detail.