Computer aided knitwear design

Dr Aniko Ekart and Paul Richards
Computer Science, Aston University

Knitwear design is a creative activity that is hard to automate using a computer. The production of the associated knitting pattern, however, is repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone, therefore in need of automation.

Our objectives are two-fold: to facilitate design and to ease the burden of calculations and checks in pattern production.

We first try to understand the problem-solution mapping. We present here our results so far, including a prototype system for the automation of knitwear design, planned to deal with both producing designs from scratch and reusing and adapting past designs by means of case based reasoning.

All our assumptions, experiments and results are based on modelling the knitwear design process used at Sirdar Spinning Ltd.