KNITWEAR DESIGN NEW VISIONS: SMART-K PROJECT. How the traditional craft methodologies are evolving into new scenarios thanks to technological innovation.

Abstract. The paper aims to investigate the future steps of prototyping and visualization technologies in the complex supply chain of knitwear design production. There are software for knitwear designers that can represent in 2D the concept phases of the product, but they stay on a purely descriptive level without adding any useful information for the final industrial producer. As technology has to improve the productive efficiency, knitwear sector especially needs this intervention as it has a long, complex, highly manual and fragmented production chain. From this problems moved, two years ago, SMART – K project, aiming to offer to Italian knitwear sector a set of new tools, in order to solve the loss of competitiveness of enterprises. With technology small and medium knitwear enterprises will enhance with efficiency their stylistic, creative and productive capabilities while preserving and value their traditional crafts know-how. Through Smart-K best practice we will clarify the near future developments which could help the "compression" of the critical productive phases, optimizing costs and production time.