Creative Tooling

Explorations in Future Forward Thinking












TEXTILE DESIGNERJess Kim


What mediums do you create in?
Knits, woven, all weaving

Making fabric, embedding patterns

Worked with touch designer as a portal to connect things

Sounds, vibration to track sounds and make instruments

Garments you can track and make sounds from


What is your creative process?
Keep a journal and sketchbook, inspired by life and reflecting, draw every night

Keep a list of songs, food, inspiration

Smell, touch, making work about those things

Thinking about presence, how a street can change one day over a next

Recording sensory experience

How do you collect inspiration?
Take sound bites and plug into touch designer

Pictures on my phone, touch designer and processing 

Put data into different snippets of code 

Throw it all in, no organization, see connections 


Map out your creative journey
1) Pre-creation - 6 months, ongoing process, generate 5-6 ideas, greater topic, make a deadline for project

2) Creation - 1.5 months on making, technical portion, 2-3 months refining

3) Post-creation - 2 months, sharing with playground aspect on website, backlog of things, sharing on IG and Tumblr (wants the live feed, work to stand on its own, work exists in its own world) 

Likes the idea of world building, chaotic design space to fit your own needs

Does a lot of moodboards, milanote and are.na

Want a space for WIP projects, physical and digital 

-> know how people think, see their sketchbook, see their creative process


How do you organize your moodboards?
Milanote can click in endlessly - hair, fashion inspo

Draw out silhouettes then click into the image and what I want things to look like

Sticky notes

Will blend analog with digital — drawing on a digital pad 

SOOT - looks super interesting 


Favorite design tools?
Notion

Analog planner - write down to remember 

Blender animation site - incorporate sketches into the work, animating those drawing, 3d objects

Touchdesigner 

Coding charts/data viz lately

Digital body scanning tool

Custom scanning device at work to scan body and get a Blender avatar, make jeans from that

When you draw, the process is important, skipping that will result in more mistakes


Design tools you are opinionated about?
AdamCAD - thinks premise is interesting, won’t work with designers because that’s not how production works

In construction, need one screw but doesn’t think it works for custom parts

Vizcom - likes the premise, application/industry needs little details like offset, higher quality CAD, good in certain applications but customizing is hard, not to the level of production

Needs specificity in the toggles, need to be keyed in

Either be great at typing commands 


What were your work / production experiences like?
Work at unspun

Custom brand with 3d weaving

Software that 3d scans and make custom, making fashion more sustainable 

Program woven structures, new machine that cuts out all waste

Yard R&D

What fiber decomposes over time

Eckhaus latta - Small team, creative freedom

Knitter it’s fun but didn’t want to be in fashion, seasonal pace is fast, Whitney collection at that time

More technical mindset

Common challenges across your experiences?

Enjoys innovation and new ways of doing things

Not applicable in manufacturing - costs

Can’t always do work that is interesting

Works with yarn mills for testing, dry work

Focused on making fabric entering the field

Lots of soft skills - communicating with vendor, personal relationships, XFN collaboration, building up infrastructure 


What feedback tool do you use?
Lattice, rippling but prefers 1:1s

Personal creative challenges?

Creativity grows with community, cultivating friends and developing that is hard

Not immediately accessible, limited time/bandwidth, takes time to build momentum


Latest inspirations? 
The Substance (color, grossness) - soundscape

Smell of temperatures (summer)

Balance hot and cold in life through clothes, regulation


Most surreal project?
Mixing sounds, layers of sound clips of rain (hometown, brother’s birthday, in my car)

Putting drawings into the project

Working on a paper to embed custom sound into textiles, modular touchpoint

Integrate a circuit into a woven textile


When are you most inspired?
2am, night owl, drink tea, jazz beats lofi


What are your reative habits?
Cooking, fashion

Lean into things I enjoy, feeds other parts of my life

Live it and the practice happens


How do you hope to grow as a creative?
Grow my creative community in the Bay

Do more meaningful work and cool projects 

Contribute to Asian American activism, understand how that impacts art movements