Seamless Knitting Is It/Can It Be Used As A Digital Crafting Tool?

Abstract

This is a positioning paper which looks at a digital technology, seamless knitting. It questions if it can be used as a digital crafting tool, or if it remains within a mass-production domain. Seamless knitwear technology was designed by its manufacturers, Stoll (Knit & Wear®) and Shima Seiki (Wholegarment®) to produce mass-production knitted garments which needed little or no post knitting construction (Peterson et al. 2008; Underwood 2009; Smith 2013). Given that this technology was born from production efficiencies and maintains the use of closed source proprietary software, can this technology be seen as having possibilities of being used as a digital crafting tool and if so does it then become a unique and identifiable specialist practice?