Rethinking the designer's role: the challenge of unfinished knitwear design

The central proposition of my PhD research is to explore the idea of openness within my practice as a designer-maker of knitwear. This focus developed out of my interest in the radical potential of amateur fashion making as a sustainable fashion strategy. While I am exploring the idea of openness on various levels, in practical terms I am designing ways of re-working existing knitted garments. I am testing and developing these methods with a small group of female amateur knitters at a series of discussion and workshop sessions. Opening up my practice brings into question my role as a professional designer-maker. In this paper, I draw on a range of sources to explore ways in which I might address openness, and discuss their implications. Using The Poetics of the Open Work by Umberto Eco, I compare classical compositions with conventional patterns, and consider the potential of ‘works in movement’, in which composer (or designer) and performer (or knitter) become collaborators and co-creators. Having considered these examples, I explore whether a designer could offer support but not authorship. We can describe the design of works in movement as designing actions to be taken by others. Re-knitting requires us to extend this: designing actions to be taken by others, which involve those others – amateur knitters – designing. Several essays in the recent book, Open Design Now, offer ways of thinking about this ‘metadesign’ role. The metadesigner supports the amateur in making design decisions, and developing their skills and knowledge. I describe my experience of working as a metadesigner in the re-knitting project, and the online resource that I have created. I use writing on open source software, a prime example of ‘commons-based peer production’, to discuss the potential of opening up the re-knitting resource to the knitting community in the future. Finally, I discuss how the metadesign role differs from that of the ‘conventional’ knitwear designer-maker, in terms of design activities and relationships with objects and users.