Past, Present and Future: A Haptic Approach to Mass-Production Seamless Knitwear Technologies

Abstract

Memory is not constituted after present perception, but is strictly contemporaneous with it, since at each instant duration divides into two simultaneous tendencies, one of which goes toward the future and the other falls back into the past. (Deleuze, 1991, p. 118)

Knitting is a ritualistic process of making which is based on binary multiplications of stitch formations, the knit and the purl. Knitting is culturally embedded within our society and wardrobes; it takes the form of the craft object to the avant-garde garment. It has a duality of making that of hand and machine, which parted ways at the onset of the European industrial revolution in the sixteenth century. It is only in the last twenty years that the machined has come full circle back to its craft roots, with the capability to produce objects on ‘the round’ through seamless knitwear technology.

This paper, engaging my current PhD research, concerns a critical assaying of the impact of seamless knitwear technologies, particularly with respect to the role of design and craft in its applications and outcomes.

Through the notions of matter, memory, duration, past and future this research advanced through a reliance on past knitwear design knowledge to initiate designs using seamless knitwear technology; though the “past” was subliminally contemporaneous. Initially garments were made out of the points of view that consisted as my design knowledge and the material relations of my knowhow—intuitive prospecting with yarns and a pre-theoretical encounter with seamless knit technology. A garment arrives, and for the first time I was able to retrace from this congealing of movements that constituted the formed matter, to the intuition-in-action that opened the haptic connectivity. This constituted the momentum of a repetition-in-difference, the shuttling of duration’s pastness and futurity, but also its virtuality, its intensive forces and its actualization, its extensive forms and formations. This process of reflective development worked both inside and outside of the internal seamless knitwear design system, by combining the functional processes of the technology with intuitive craft responses to each garment’s affective qualities embedded with design memories.

Computational design methods in the knitwear industry have a genuine impact on the skill sets of practitioners. Such an impact requires new approaches to design method as well as new ways of understanding design histories and the possibilities of futures. This research challenges past design methods and re-kindles influential creative past experiences. The traditional Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi was one past experiential influence that surfaced during this research, through its proximate resonance and dissonance with seamless knitwear. In its current applications, seamless knitwear appears to be antithetical to traditional Japanese approaches to creativity. To engage this ‘present’ of a complex of technological, historical and aesthetic forces that distend contemporary knitwear practices, my paper aims to ask how we might think the time of production differently and in this find interstitial spacing’s in computational design processes that invigorate a more traditional understanding of design.