The Textile Design Process

Design is 98 per cent common sense and 2 per cent that mystical ingredient that you might call creativity. But it's that thing that makes a perfectly decent object into something really special, really desirable that people want as much as they might want a Picasso on the wall’. Sir Terence Conran, cited in Cooper and Press (1995).The textile industry is a multifaceted area, requiring an understanding of design, management and technology for its success. Textile design has a crucial role to play in creating innovative and attractive products for various end-user applications which range from fashion to automotive to sportswear to medical textiles. But little is known about how textile designers work in practice. The approaches taken to professional practice by designers working in different environments in the textile industry is discussed in this paper. The contexts are: a world-renowned textile design house, a global textile manufacturer, an international furnishing company, a freelance textile designer, a textile design consultant, and a small textile design studio.