Abstract

If the concept of good design is necessary for traditional fashion design as clothes making, knitwear is now facing a decisive change from hobby to project. Craftsmanship in Italy is a key ingredient for businesses success when it is able to project itself into a new economic and cultural dimension. In this way, we can talk about knitwear design as a specific field of “Made in Italy” that is completely changing: to become a project, knitwear must produce garments enhancing traditional techniques while expressing the spirit of time. Today knitwear design teaching is an evolving and largely unexplored field; it concerns a complex process, combining ancient techniques of traditional knowledge with experimentation and technological innovation. Today, the ability to explore contexts in an original way allows for the proposal of ideas and results that are not only technical solutions of established problems, but also creatively solve problems, invent new ones, or look at old problems in a different way. This paper outlines the challenges designers are facing while passing knowledge on to other young designers still in the Academy. They not only teach a manual technique, but also a method that involves multiple aspects that clearly affect the production chain.