JTATM - North Carolina State University

Nike Session
Interface: Academic and Industry Professionals

Susan Ashdown and Suzanne Loker
Cornell University

Classroom collaborations between higher education and industry always enhance student learning and give industry professionals an opportunity to share their expertise with the future leaders of their field. They also provide a setting in which the academic and industry worlds can learn from each other. Such was the inspiration for the pre-conference session at the annual meeting of the International Textile and Apparel (ITAA) in November 2004 in Portland, Oregon. The goal was to provide a forum for ITAA researchers and Nike professionals to discuss state-of-the-art apparel research at the interface between materials and technology.

Cornell’s department of Textiles and Apparel has had a long relationship with Nike’s Apparel Group through alumni who work at Nike and several classroom projects that drew on Nike expertise and offered students real-life design problems, industry resources, and collaboration. Nike’s Janet Moss, Director of the Apparel Group, and several colleagues visited Cornell in Fall 2003 to view the final presentations from a mass customization design project in one of Susan Ashdown’s courses using a 3D body scanner to design and produce custom fit warm-up pants.

During their visit we discussed the obstacles to extended collaborations between professionals in the academic and industry research arenas. We discussed how wonderful it would be to be able to assemble a number of the university apparel researchers in one place accessible to many industry employees instead of the more common situation of Nike and other industrial partners working with schools on an individual basis. Based on the fact that the 2004 ITAA annual conference was to be held in Portland, we hatched our plan. We would invite a number of ITAA members who were conducting apparel research at the interface of design, materials, and technology to present at a pre-conference session hosted by Nike at their Beaverton, Oregon corporate headquarters. Then, we would referee and publish the papers from the session (and other related papers) in a focused issue of the electronic Journal of Textiles and Apparel, Technology and Management (JTATM). Students, professors, and industry would be able to easily access all of the papers in one place in a timely manner. This issue includes a number of papers based on the presentations that day.

The pre-conference event took place on November 3, 2004 with fourteen presenters from eight different universities and an audience of 15 additional ITAA members and over 50 Nike professionals who came to presentations throughout the session. The four-hour session covered papers on digital printing technology and design, design research field methods, body scan technology and fit, apparel fit analysis, thermal comfort, functional clothing design, and smart clothing. The presentations provoked lively discussion and fostered new relationships between academia and industry. A dinner the next evening hosted by Nike extended our opportunities to interact and many presenters provided electronic copies of their presentations to be posted on Nike’s internal educational web site for future study. The final contribution of the interface is this current issue of JTATM.