Robotics Living Lab at Manchester Fashion Institute

This proposed investment will generate a world-class micro-scale digital fashion production facility. The research it enables will drive new forms of highly-responsive business models for UK garment manufacturers, encourage new forms of research partnerships and enable UK Fashion Practice Research to affect policy change towards carbon neutral manufacturing. The Living Lab will be hugely impactful across multiple sectors with beneficiaries include the robotics, digital, engineering and fashion sectors and lead to the transformative reconfiguration of the UK fashion manufacturing industry needed for a sustainable future.

Manchester Fashion Institute, a standalone entity as part of The School of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University, will repurpose two spaces at the heart of MFI - equipping a highly visible showcase - a Robotics Living Lab - and a Work in Progress (WIP) space. Fashion Practice Research led by the Living Lab's designer/ researchers in collaboration with SME fashion designer/fabricator businesses and digital and robotics engineering is central to the vision for an agile, digitised fashion industry. Automation offers the capabilities to innovate in manufacturing processes where the UK could become a leader in the field for small scale, on-shored production. However, tooling needs to be affordable for SMEs, making cost and accessibility the two driving factors for any new development.

The Robotics Living Lab at MFI will ideate, test, and develop new tooling solutions in an acknowledgement that innovative manufacturing processes bring new value propositions to small fashion design businesses. Future tooling recommendations in this new field come in the forms of robotic tabletop/desktop solutions, build-your-own /modular systems or multi-use robotics that can run flexibly and both learn and suggest fabrication processes and sequencing. New developments in CAD software further enables predictions of energy usage per tool use suggesting strong capabilities for AI-enabled carbon monitoring during production cycles.

To facilitate skilful design-led manufacturing that is sustainable and moves towards being carbon neutral, businesses are keen to avoid mono-solutions therefore enabling them to fully leverage the investment in new accessible entry-level machinery. Predictions for the future of work strongly suggest the gap between engineering and design will continue to shrink. Working with new tooling will allow designers to leverage technology to create quality jobs, building capacity for creatively fulfilling employment. Tooling for a newly configured industry needs to be user-friendly and adaptable for use by differently abled people, directly supporting onshoring agendas and strengthening local supply chains.

The high levels of sustainable repurposing and retrofitting of the two interconnected sites reflects a commitment to ameliorating climate crisis, net zero manufacturing, and renewables as core principles. Important to this vision is the visibility of the lab and the new courtyard showcase to demonstrate practice research and attract students, visitors, and academics to the work of the lab. Through critical appraisal, questioning and holding to account the way fashion is traditionally made and consumed the Lab will enable students to become better-informed designers, makers, manufacturers, technologists; publics to be better informed consumers; academics to become enthusiastic collaborators in transdisciplinary research practice and in developing joint methodologies.