Reinventing jacquard textile design via the deployment of digitisation technology towards innovative ends

Abstract

Among the many types of textile fabrics, jacquard fabric is one of the high graded fabrics due to its higher technological requirements in design and production and its often intrigued figured and coloured textures. For thousands of years, jacquard fabric design has very much been a mechanical reproduction of hand-paintings under a conventional single plane design mode that is often laborious and time-consuming. Moreover, owing to the restriction of handcraft, jacquard fabric is restricted in its scope and effect in colour expression. Today, with the rapid development of digitisation technology, this study was made possible via the deployment of digitisation in jacquard design and production and the expansion of past and present jacquard fabric design theories and methods; and in turn enabled new ways of jacquard textile design and development toward various "novel effects" of jacquard fabrics that were otherwise not possible to realise before. Traditionally, structure of jacquard fabrics has been designed based on single plane design mode and one-to-one corresponding structural design principle with reference to the colour effect of hand drawing pattern. The innovative design mode invented in this study, i.e., layered-combination mode, was inspired originally from the design principle and method of digital image instead. By combining several single layers of fabrics, jacquard fabrics created in this study enabled colour expression at mega-level. This design research is practice-led in nature. A novel design concept for jacquard fabric design was proposed and developed. The study is presented in three parts: the first part is establishment of a theoretical framework. Based on the design characteristics of digital image, the design principles and methods for digital jacquard fabric were developed under layered-combination mode during which the design method of digital image was analysed from colourless design mode to colourful design mode. The second part is the practical research during which the key technical issues and related optimal solutions of the process of layered-combination design were suggested. Particular focus was given to the principle and method of fabric structure design and corresponding colour mixing theory. Subsequently, a design method of full-colour compound structure was invented for creation of digital jacquard fabrics. The third and last part is the design creation. It follows the innovative design principles and methods of digital jacquard fabric so derived under the aforementioned layered-combination mode. By applying full- colour compound structure design, not only were the designs created able to simulate black-and-white and multicoloured digital images, but also were they able to innovate new visual effects, e.g., figured shot-effect and figured double-face fabrics, by which the merits of layered-combination design mode were highlighted. The thrust of this research lies in the establishment of new design concept, principles and methods of jacquard fabric, by which the technical and creative scope of jacquard textile creation are expanded with the possibility of creating a range of novel jacquard effects that are otherwise not possible to be realised before.