Please note: In the morning, the event will take place in Engineering B 2B.026 and in the afternoon, we will move over to room 2A.020
Women are key to the clothing industry in the UK, though often the mundane nature of manufacture means their skills are overlooked as engineering. This is compounded as we seek cheaper ways to exploit manufacturing offshore, however, technology provides clear opportunities to embed engineering approaches. Developing a roadmap to ensure that technology adoption can be implemented and that the women involved can create and apply engineering knowledge is key to upskilling, reskilling and embedding technology solutions to enhance our manufacturing.
Indicative Agenda:
09:30 – 10am Arrivals
10 – 10:10 – Welcome to the event
10:10 – 10:40 – Olivia Vaughan-Fowler, NRDA Studio - https://www.nrda.studio/ - Actual fit versus estimated fit: a journey to auto generating 2D mannequins
Reducing the body to a series of measurements, no matter how many or how precise, is a bit like removing all the landscape characteristics from a map, leaving just the roads, and claiming that it's still an accurate map of an area. Pattern theories are an attempt to fill in the gaps, but they're really just estimations, necessitating multiple fittings (whether physical or digital) in order to finalise a pattern. How can we create 2D pattern blocks which accurately and precisely represent the entirety of the original 3D body, so that we can guarantee fit without trial and error?
10:40 – 11:10 – Kristina Brubacher, ADE Group, Engineering Sportswear
11:10 – 11:20 – Tarfah Alrushayden
11:20 – 11:30 – Kasey Hatch: Using body scanning technology to develop sizing for sports compression leggings.
Developing the theory to underpin the sizing process for women's sports compression leggings, using 3D/4D body scanning to understand the athletic female body and how it changes during movement.
11:30 – 11:40 – Clare Richardson: Apparel engineering for a slower fashion idustry
Exploring how technical developments in bespoke clothing production may play a role in supporting slower and more sustainable models in the fashion industry.
11:40 – 11:50 – Laura Kavanagh
11:50 – 12:00 – Final Speaker
12 – 1pm - Networking Lunch
1 – 3:30: Brainstorming development session.
To determine a direction for how technology enabled bespoke clothing manufacture can be adopted within Manchester. A focus will be on how we can consider the provision of skills and training for bespoke production in SME’s utilising existing technologies and identifying key areas of development.
This session will focus on the four identified stages of 1. Body Scanning and Measurement Capture; 2. Data Processing; 3. Pattern Development and 4. VR/AR and Fit. The resources developed by ADE’s M-ADE outreach events held in early July and the online session of the 24th July will provide materials to support discussion. The outcome will consider a civic strategy for the wider adoption of technology enabled approaches within the Greater Manchester region, with consideration of proposed investment in high tech manufacturing in the region.
We will consider the necessary skills at each stage of the process and seek to formulate a job specification for these skillsets to support identification of training requirements. We will explore the skillsets developed in HE and the need to nurture pre-HE skills and support adoption of training that could be embedded into the current employment environment. A clear point of discussion will consider how to ensure the mostly female workforce can identify and be identified as engineers who can promote and drive forwards the ambitions of high quantity high tech reshoring of fashion.
3:30 – 4pm: Wrap up
