Designer's technical knowledge in knitwear: a focus on the transition from manual operations to digital and electronic integration.

Contemporary knitwear is one of the areas with the greatest technological advancement in the textile-clothing sector. Since more than twenty years, in order to satisfy the frenetic industrial rhythms, more and more new electronic machines, programmed through CAD software, are used by programmers. Universities, for economic and space reasons, most of the times are not able to buy these machines. In the rare case in which this happens, it remains quite difficult to organize a curriculum capable of including these high technical value tools in the design phase. The university of the Politecnico di Milano, is one of the few examples in Europe. Since 2017, the university owns some electronic machines of Shima Seiki. It has started a didactic path aimed at spreading a practical and theoretical knowledge of these machines, in order to obtain products that best simulate the industrial reality. The direction of this training does not aim to make known all the technical aspects of this apparatus. This would create an overlapping of skills, as the two figures of the designer and the technician are divided in terms of tasks and skills. The designers, however, do not have all the skills necessary to be able to dialogue with these technical figures. The problem that is found at the didactic level is the inconsistency between the contemporary industrial essence of the project and the methods of manufacturing inside the Universities. In schools, the garments are made following the artisan panorama of the hand needlework and the use of manual machines of the 60s. Indeed, this allows the student to experience an in-depth level of knowledge and experimentation, in the center of which there is always the same subject: the knit. But after leaving university, not having fully understood the tools of the modern knitting industry, new graduates find themselves in difficulty in understanding the new design parameters. These parameters are constituted by new and specific constraints, established exclusively by the executive possibilities of electronic machines. As a result of the Covid-19 epidemic, and the shifting of most of the lessons to telematic format, it has become increasingly necessary for the university to be able to provide an organized didactic support material. On the basis of the parametric programming of the software "Shaping", used by Shima Seiki, technical sheets have been designed, to support students during the lessons. Using those pages, the students would easily create some knitting stitches and structures using the software. This allows the students to test themselves with the industrial dynamics of the working world. An example of knowledge to be acquired through these worksheets, concerns the choice of the yarn according to the working process, and the understanding of the execution time. These last two factors are in fact the two main variables that allow to establish the final cost of a knitting products and then determine the subsequent industrialization of the finished garment.