A human centric research of skills and decision making capacity

Who is involved in the project?

Royal College of Art & Cranfield University

Susan Postlethwaite s.postlethwaite@mmu.ac.uk 
Kat Thiel kat.thiel@rca.ac.uk;
Sarah Fletcher s.fletcher@cranfield.ac.uk;
Ibetta Eimontaite Iveta.Eimontaite@cranfield.ac.uk;

What is the project doing? 

The project is based in Human Factors and design practice research to explore skills levels in garment manufacturing to consider the steps that can be designed out, and performed by robots , or those needing to remain performed by skilled  human makers,  importantly identifying  requirements for promoting worker satisfaction via new technology and automation particularly co-botics.

Desk-based research is being used to establish the state of the art of the skills levels held by machinists in the UK garment industry and what tools exist to enable analysis of these skills levelsand a limited trial of the eye tracking analysis to explore cognitive / decision-making activity.

Why is this needed? 

The UK’s fashion industry has an international reputation for creative design but is a field which is seeing limited impact of new technologies in manufacture. The project begins to address the challenges of integrating automation into a highly creative sector with a need for very high levels of agility in production processes.

How can members get involved? 

The project team would welcome input from economists and policy makers to inform our understanding of the business case for reshoring UK manufacture. Introductions to engineering/ manufacturing sites/ research labs and hubs would be very valuable. We are also looking for members who are interested in being added to our stakeholder list.