POP was very pleased to be invited to participate in the annual Digital Design Weekend held at the Victoria & Albert Museum, 20-22nd September 2024.
Our event was an experiment. We set out to explore what might happen if we combined a large dataset of historic open access and out of copyright clothing patents and AI.
Do AI technologies assist or limit our design imaginations?
Our event was called: Speculative Sewing AI
We asked: Do AI technologies assist or limit our design imaginations?
We invited participants to explore what AI might bring to historic clothing research and sewing.
Speculatively stitching the past and the future led to interesting and unexpected results.
Collectively our results (+ prompts) aimed to generate insights and discussion about how useful, challenging and collaborative these digital tools might be for design practice.
Our set up included two computer screens, posters of patents and costumes on dress forms.
We have been collaborating with Jamie Shilvock, an alumni of the Goldsmiths MA Computational Arts programme. He developed a platform whereby Speculative Sewing AI is an explorative work into how the recent advancements in artificial intelligence could assist or hinder clothing design development.
We have a large dataset of open access clothing patents from 1820, which we have used to fine-tune a stable diffusion model allowing the system to learn the aesthetics of what constitutes a patent.
We invited participants to input a problem into the system and see if it could design a solution.
Whilst the model might have a visual reference, it has no actual understanding of what constitutes creating a design for an article of clothing. So, we questioned how useful the results it generated were – and laughed a lot when humans had multiple legs, ears and on one occasion a tail!
Results were amazing, confusing, inspiring and ridiculous.
As expected the results were mixed.
There are was delight and amusement, as well as frustration and confusion with the results.
As per all AI models, the outcomes are only as useful as the body of data it draws on and questions we ask.
Collectively, we found some of the results inspiring for an initial stage of design, but they required significant skills, expertise and imagination to take them further – these were far from finished designs or workable patterns.
Over 3000 people attend the event and over 450 designs were generated by the platform.
Overall, we enjoyed the experiment and found it useful for generating some of the key discussions at the intersection of design, new technology, and creative industries.
And we plan to develop this project further, and reconstruct some of these results.
Because honestly, who wouldn’t want to try and make and wear some of the designs below……
Jamie designed a fantastic archive of AI generated designs for participants to see what others had asked the system. Learning how to develop prompts was a central part of the project.
The Speculative Sewing AI archive came in the form of an ever growing sphere and cylinder of designs that people could navigate around.
