Nottingham lace: capturing and representing knowledge in people, machines and documents.

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This work brings together academics in History and Design with textile industry and museum specialists to develop and test methods of capturing and disseminating specific aspects of the Leavers process developed in Nottingham in the early C19 to replicate the qualities of handmade lace. The intention of the project is to develop and test robust and valid methods to capture three forms of knowledge: in the documentary record, in the remaining machinery and in the tacit knowledge of the surviving craftspeople. The further intention is to develop and test methods of representing this knowledge that exists in compounds of things and people, which make it accessible to a range of users, including museum curators, historians of technology, textile design practitioners and, potentially, future manufacturers. The methods will be developed and tested by focusing on the resource that exists in the sole remaining business in England producing Leavers lace, Cluny Lace at Ilkeston, Derbyshire. The project will document what is an imminently redundant technology by capturing both the aspects of the technical specifications of the Leavers manufacturing technology and the tacit knowledge of the remaining craftspeople at Cluny Lace. The equipment will be documented through access to historical plans, archive and contemporary photography and patents, through contact with existing partners (from the previous Science & Heritage Research Cluster 'Understanding Complex Structures') as well as new collaborators. The research process focuses on specific aspects of the Leavers process, through which it will develop a procedure that can be extended in future work to other aspects of the process. Of the three sources of knowledge about the process, it is the remaining craftspeople that is the most fragile because both documents and machines endure. The process will therefore start with the remaining crafts people at Cluny Lace, using interview and observation to identify specific aspects of the process that can be tracked back through the design of the machines into patent and design registration records.The exploration of the craftspeople's tacit knowledge will draw on methods from social science that extend beyond direct interview to use video observation and analysis that can capture proprioceptive/ kinaesthetic knowledge. This part of the work will draw on precedents in the analysis of dance and sport. The subsequent phases of the work will follow the leads provided by this work with people to represent and analyse the aspects of the machinery relevant to it, using 3D computer animation. Both these phases of the work will be underpinned and informed by work that traces the relevant innovations in machinery, production technique and textile design in patent records and the Board of Trade Design Registration scheme held at The National Archive. Work that follows this project will be able to reiterate this process in the other direction - starting with the documents, moving to the machines and then to the people.A re-assessment of the material history of the UK textile industry is timely in the light of the rapid development of the Chinese and Indian economies which may mean that textile production returns to the UK over coming years.