Functional Clothing Design: From Sportswear to Spacesuits - Softcover

Functional Clothing Design is a book about how and why clothing works. This interdisciplinary text introduces new ways to look at the human body, the environment and clothing and to explore the relationships between them by looking at the ways clothing achieves goals such as protecting the body, increasing health and safety, improving a worker's efficiency on the job or increasing body function.

Watkins and Dunne present technical material using clear, simple language that can be readily understood by beginning design students with no science or engineering background. Building on the groundbreaking text by Watkins,Clothing: The Portable Environment, this text covers a full range of factors involved in designing functional clothing: protection from thermal, impact and other environmental hazards; enhancing movement and visibility and increasing body function with smart clothing; designing clothing for people with handicaps and designing protective clothing for groups such as the military, who face multiple hazards.

Functional Clothing Design focuses on the full range of activities needed to develop functional clothing--from analysis of user needs to choosing appropriate materials to design and design evaluation. The text includes case studies throughout as well as new content on smart textiles and all the latest developments in wearable technology. Designers and others seeking clothing solutions to problems in many fields will find a common language linking a number of disciplines through which they can explore both problems and solutions.

Susan M. Watkins is Professor Emeritus in Apparel Design from Cornell University, USA, and Designer and Manager of Portable Environments, LLC, a consulting company focused on protective clothing design.

Lucy E. Dunne is Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA, where she sits on the faculty of Design, Housing, and Apparel and Human Factors and Ergonomics, as well as holding affiliate membership in the graduate faculties of Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Institute for Health Informatics.