Overconstrained and Underconstrained Creativity: Changing the Rhetoric to Negotiate the Boundaries of Design

What people think creativity is and what constitutes designing influences how designing is organized and carried out, and how design colleagues interact. In contrast to engineering, the fashion industry sees design as the process from idea to specification carried out by designers, and creativity only as open-ended and unconstrained. This reflects widespread beliefs about creativity and rhetoric about design. In knitwear, much detailed design is done by technicians converting these specifications into a program for knitting a garment. This often requires creative problem solving in finding a way to realise an idea or in optimising production without compromising the aesthetic appearance. Knitwear designers and technicians seldom co-design, but only a collaboration between designers and technicians can lead to an exploitation of the full potential of modern production machinery. This observation has implications for interactions between artistic and technical designers in a variety of other industries.