ZeroWD: Supporting Zero-Waste Garment Design with Linked Edits

Abstract

In traditional garment manufacturing, the way fabrics are cut produces significant waste due to inefficiencies in the design and layout of the garment panels on fabric. Recently fashion designers have begun to explore different ways to design and layout garment panels in more efficient ways. An extreme example of this efficient fashion design process is zero waste fashion design, which aims to use all available fabric in the resulting garment. Currently many zero waste fashion designers manually cut out the 2D patterns and experiment with their 3D shape. With zero-waste design being inherently strictly constrained by the dimensions of the fabric, designers need to perform meticulous calculations for tasks as resizing and restyling. In our work, we propose ZeroWD, a novel interactive design tool that assists zero-waste fashion design by bringing pattern layout and cutting earlier in the design process. With our tool, designers can design zero waste garment panels and simulate the garment’s 3D shape with realtime feedback. By embedding zero-waste design constraints into the system, we enable designers to focus on the creative design rather than tedious constraint solving. Our user study demonstrates that ZeroWD can help fashion designers create garments with minimal waste.