Susan Postlethwaite is Professor of Fashion Technologies, Manchester Fashion Institute and Director of the Robotics Living Lab (RoLL). She is an alumna of the prestigious Policy Fellowship programme at the Royal Academy of Engineering and was co-investigator for AHRC funded Creative Clusters Future Fashion Factory: Digitally Enabled Design & Manufacture of Designer Products for Circular Economies. Susan is an industry expert for N+ Back to Baselines NERC Funded. Scientifically Validated Environmental and Design Baselines, Standards and Principals. She is also a member of AHRC Peer Review College and was a panel member for REF 2021. Panel D. Sub-panel 32. Following a fashion design career working for Ralph Lauren and Georgio Armani Susan was Director of the Fashion Futures Masters Programme at London College of Fashion and Senior Research Fellow Fashion Programme at Royal College of Art where she won £ 3 million for the Burberry Material Futures Research Group. Her research interests include new robotic and co-botic technologies and automation in manufacturing, micro factories, reshoring of the UK fashion design/manufacturing sector which includes focusing on Industry 4.0+ and 5.0 economic theory, policy inclusion and circular economy agendas engaging with regional and central government. She has a long-term collaboration with the Manufacturing Technology Centre as part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult.
The Robotics Living Lab (RoLL) is a new fashion research facility aimed at helping support micro-scale and SME fashion businesses develop high value, low volume garment production using agile robotic and cobot technologies for more sustainable production.
Opening in October 2024, RoLL received £3.8m by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to build and equip the new facility as part of the CResCa World Class Lab series. This funding will support research into highly responsive approaches for garment manufacturers.
RoLL recognises the need to modernise the UK fashion sector through creative automation and digitisation enabling designers to offer world-class fashion design products that are locally manufactured as part of reshoring or a near shoring agenda.
Fashion Practice Research in collaboration with micro and SME fashion designer/fabricator businesses is core to RoLL’s vision for an agile, digitised, design-led fashion industry. Automation offers capabilities to innovate where the UK could become a leader in the field for small-scale production. Future tooling will be developed by RoLL in the form of robotic desktop solutions, build-your-own /modular systems or multi-use collaborative robotics for linked micro-factory or studio settings.
A Co-Design Residency Programme (CDRP) workshop series and focus groups will be offered to support designer/ manufacturer businesses speculate on, propose, design, and iterate the kind of robotics or agile tooling that could support developments in their business. RoLL will design and promote a bi-directional industry and academic facing methodology, engage with policy makers proposing inclusion of fashion in a new industrial strategy document and address the upskilling of a workforce where creative approaches to automation, ease of use and more intuitive design of technologies, and lowering of costs in automation will encourage young people back into manufacturing.
