Lissy Hatfield
- Research Associate
Lissy is a researcher and interdisciplinary designer, with a background in Textiles. Her interests lie within knitted inhabitable spaces and sensory properties of materials.
Lissy is a Research Associate working within the Material Science Research Centre. She is building a Sensory Materials Library with her team for AiDLab.
With a background in material construction, Lissy brings her Textile and Design knowledge to the interdisciplinary project. Through objective testing and subjective assessments of materials, the team are developing AiLoupe, an AI aided design tool to capture designer’s tacit knowledge. AiLoupe is a material identification and selection tool that aims to translate ‘hand feel’ digitally. Capturing designer’s tacit knowledge into this tool aims to educate and suggest more sustainable and appropriate material selection.
She is also currently undertaking a Postgraduate Certificate in Creative Education part time alongside her RA role.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Gallery
More information
Research interests
Lissy graduated from the RCA Textiles MA in 2022, where she implemented knit in a variety of interdisciplinary research projects. She uses knit as a problem-solving tool within architectural, product, and medical applications and collaborations. Lissy’s MA thesis examined the relationship between Knitted Textiles and Architecture. This research explores the sustainable attributers knitting can offer the built environment through smart yarn compositions and deployable structures, offering potential for disassembly and portability.
Her research also addresses Design Hierarchy, the undervaluation of Craft and Textiles and how these have historically been considered ‘women’s work’ and still often only an afterthought in the Design Process.
In the current AiDLab research project Lissy takes a co-creation and knowledge exchange approach through conducting studies and workshops. Working with designers to tailor their needs into the work results in desirable and useful developments of the tool.
Practice
Alongside Lissy’s Research Associate position, she continues to develop her personal practice. Knitting samples for architectural contexts, she focuses on addressing sound qualities in built environments and open spaces. She questions what autonomy people could gain in more meaningful, adaptable spaces through interchangeable knitted partitions.
Awards
The Textiles Society Student Bursary, 2022
UPW Yarn Sponsorship Award, 2022
The Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters Byford Bursary Award, 2022
Kay Cosserat Scholarship Award, 2021
The Coats Foundation Trust Bursary Award, 2021
Current and recent projects
AiDLab, 2022
The project, Intelligent Design Systems for Innovation, will develop an intelligent design system consisting of a suite of AI-driven design tools for the benefit of both the designer and the consumer. The embodied knowledge design input tools and Sensory Materials Library enable human intervention and creativity, and so permit a responsive manufacturing process. The project is aimed at harnessing implicit, embodied knowledge to enable distributed and democratic design.
Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, 2021
As a Research Assistant in a Design Sprint for an Asian smartphone company, Lissy worked in an interdisciplinary team defining what resilience means for their brand post-pandemic. They also explored how this research could inform the design of their technology and human experience and interactions with it. Lissy knitted with smart yarns to conduct material experiments to redefine resilience visually and metaphorically for the brand. Conveying ‘soft’ resilience and exchanging the currency of resilience through craft were main concepts developed in the research project.
RCA’s Grand Challenge: Design for Safety, 2020/21
Within the biggest single-institution postgraduate design project in the world, Lissy worked in an interdisciplinary team of five. Within the topic of Design for Safety, they were given the theme Next Generation Interactions and followed the Double Diamond method to develop their concept, The Yellow Box. The Yellow Box is a unified, universal public mental health safety infrastructure which includes education, signage, behavioural nudges, digital experiences, and crisis response. It provides a set of tools to deal with mental and emotional challenges that is introduced from childhood and put to use throughout life. After being shortlisted, the project was developed for another month and won two out of four awards in the final round.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Exhibitions
(2023) AiLoupe. Fashion X AI touring exhibition. Hong Kong. https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/5546
(2023) AiLoupe. Future Fabric Expo, London. https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/5548
(2023) AiLoupe. Intertextile. Shanghai.