Development of an integrated platform for online fashion sketch design

Abstract

Fashion industry faces mounting pressures to shorten the product development cycle and better respond to the needs of today's more powerful customers. In the past two decades, many research efforts have been spent to improve the fashion product development process, in particular in the area of computer aided design. However, it is worth noting that sketch design is an unexplored area in the research of fashion product development while designers are longing for intelligent and user-friendly design support systems. This study therefore aims to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of sketch design in the fashion product development process. A platform with three sketch design support systems is proposed to serve different purposes, following either a top-down approach or a bottom up approach. Top-down approach focuses on establishing a systematic understanding of different style elements on sketch composition so as to simplify and streamline the sketch creation. In contrast, the bottom-up approach aims to optimise information retrieval and understanding from existing designs. These two approaches complement each other. Following the top-down approach, a Sketch Representation and Composing Method (SRCM) is first developed based on a systematic understanding on sketch design. Two systems, namely Web-based Interactive Sketch Design (WISD) system and Interactive Genetic Algorithm based Sketch Design (IGASD) system, are developed based on the SRCM, serving professional designers and general customers. WISD system implements interactive sketch design on the Web by maximising design efficiency and minimising operation complexities. Compared with WISD system, IGASD system adopts a design knowledge model and uses interactive genetic algorithm to hide design complexities from users (i.e. general customers), while ensures the creation of feasible designs. By a bottom-up approach, Image-based Sketch Design (ISD) system is proposed. This system researches on optimised information retrieval and understanding from images of existing design. WISD and IGASD systems have been quantitative evaluated. It has proved that the systems improve effectiveness and efficiency of sketching, also lower the barrier of general customers’ participation in the design process. The design variation depends on the comprehensiveness of style database in the SRCM. On the contrary, ISD system, adopting a bottom-up approach to support design, proposes a series of steps to retrieve and understand important information from images and converts the information as vector graphs for further processing. It can be used as a research analysis tool by designers to speed up the design operation. All in all, the proposed platform contains complementary systems can improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of sketch design in the fashion product development process.