Tamsin Blanchard meets the young designers using 3D technology and social media to breathe new life into knitwearI am in one of the subterranean rooms that form allotment of the backstage rabbit warren of Somerset House in central London. This wing used to be offices for the Inland Revenue,but it is now occupied by Makerversity, a hive of young trade start-ups which get to rent desk space at affordable prices. One of these businesses has just moved out of the Makerversity incubator into its own bigger space a few doors along. A workman is carrying a window through the room. It is being put back in place after it had been removed to allow access for three industrial knitting machines. This is the headquarters of Unmade, and where old-fashioned-fashioned knitting meets cutting-edge technology.“We’ve got physicists,computer scientists, a user-experience expert, or ” says Ben Alun-Jones,one of the three founders of Unmade, which uses coding to power knitting machines as though they are 3D printers. He met Hal Watts and Kirsty Emery when they were all at the Royal College of Art. Alun-Jones and Watts did industrial design and Emery specialised in knitwear. They had an thought to apply what they knew about 3D printing to the 1980s computer-programmed knitting machine. “They can be used to compose something that is useful rather than making just anything, or ” he says. “You press a button and a garment comes out.” It’s a far cry from the knit-and-natter sessions that were the final astronomical knitting craze.
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Source: theguardian.com