Designing Knit Designers. Teaching tools and methods to train professionals for the knitwear industry

This study focuses on Italian knitwear both as an industrial excellence, placed halfway between tradition and technological innovation, and as a design discipline taught in design universities, with the aim to experiment with new ways to support SMEs and to answer their concrete needs in terms of young professionals. On the academic side, the growing correspondence of the disciplines of fashion design with their respective specialized production areas creates an opportunity for knitwear to be addressed in this study from a designer-researcher perspective, and thus to be recognized as a discipline that deserves specific teaching tools and methods and focused scientific research. From an industrial standpoint, knitwear is one of the most complex realities of Made in Italy, with a long and fragmented production chain made up of many different stakeholders that leads to significant waste in terms of time, resources and materials leaving a low budget for the training of new designers. In this scenario, it is increasingly urgent for higher education to understand how to train knit designers as professionals able to act in between tradition and innovation, owning creative and technical skills along with with specific competencies, other than those of a more generic fashion designer. The study works towards this objective, keeping knitwear inside the boundaries of the Italian industrial design culture and acting with experimental activities towards the definition of tools and methods to train professionals to be able to respond to the needs of the industrial context, with the proper technical and cultural knowledge and the project-oriented mindset that is typical of industrial design disciplines.