Last June I opened together with a team, a fablab here in Milan. We believe fablab should be connected with their territory that's why we focused many of our activities to attract people coming from design and fashion design scene. Student and professionals in those fields are used to make a lot of prototyping and small scale production of furniture, products, accessories and garments. The use of digital fabrication technologies could accelerate the iteration of their work and produce small batches of ready-to-sell products.
In the first 6 months we realized that on one side, people coming from design background have skills for software to produce vectorial drawings (.svg, .dxf, .eps), people coming from fashion design have great manual skills in producing technical drawings but are not able to use software and their archives are mostly made of cardboard and paper. On top of that, many fashion designers express their creativity using "Moulage " technique: draping paper or textiles directly on the mannequin and create the technical drawing with reverse-engineering the result.
A different way to convert paper patterns into vector/digital designs. And what about doing also the opposite? Print vector patterns on paper or directly on textile using a simple marking system.
Do you remember the portable scanner ScanMan? see here if you're too young ;) A portable rolling scanner that you can use to digitize a document or image.
The idea is to create a digitally fabricated device that can be moved on a surface. The device has wheels connected to sensor (i.e. rotary encoder) that can recognize relative position on a x-y plane. The user moves it following the line on paper with the help of a pointer. The user clicks on a button to memorize marks (the more marks the more accurate the drawing).
reverse the process
automation