Intelligent support for communication in design teams: Garment shape specifications in the knitwear industry

Communication between different members of a design team is a notoriously difficult problem, especially at the early stages of the design process. In the knitwear design process, the communication between knitwear designers and technicians has been identified in an empirical study as a major bottleneck. While knitwear is inherently difficult to communicate, the design culture does little ease the problem. This paper argues that an intelligent design support system allows the designers to turn their typically incomplete, inconsistent and inaccurate specification of designs into a correct representation of their ideas, thus reducing the interpretation by technicians as well as the design time. This can be achieved by automatically creating design solution suggestions based on the designers' customary specifications. This principle has been illustrated for the construction of garment shapes, which were modeled mathematically.