Sportswear companies strive for digital transformation. The comprehensive shift from 2D development tools to a 3D development environment requires a high degree of flexibility and the willingness to expand one’s own skillset. The question of this research is: What influence does the changing environment have on the development process in design?
Moving development process to purely digital surrounding reduces the number of senses that are involved in the development process to just one: the eyesight. The question that must be pursued is: Are designers going to be able to create good products, despite lacking the four other senses?
The world is changing and nowadays it seems that almost anyone, regardless of their background, can claim to be a designer, the only requirement therefore is the ability to work with different design apps. Generation Z has already been named as the “digital natives”, while Generation Alpha is born into digital structures, with their way of thinking and living being shaped by the digital environment at an early age. The future will be digitally woven, the question is: How far will we go?
Since spring 2023, there has been a public discussion about creativity being a skill that can be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI). Different visual generative algorithms make it possible to create multiple realistic product variations within seconds by defining key parameters in just few words. As human beings have reached a point where digital transformation has taken an exponential path, the question appears: How to transform fear of the unknown into progress? What are the skills that leverage designers from everyone else? Where will digital transformation take us, and what impact will technological transformation have on design skill set? What tasks are going to be overtaken from AI in favour of advancing developmental process?
This work is an attempt to speculate about and reflect on how the development process will evolve through time and what influence digital transformation will bring to the sportswear industry. The aim of the theoretical research is to crystallize the advantages and challenges that will arise through the implementation of 3D Fashion Software, as well as AI.
By speculating about how the future development methods in sportswear will look as well as offering a complementary tool to ease the sportswear development. The goal is to enhance the way that designers could work hand-in-hand with new technologies.
With the help of this research, there is a hope to reduce the detachment from digital 3D development processes and self-learning systems, as well as embracing the opportunities that future will open up.