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Buffalo State Stories
Elaine Polvinen, M.F.A.
Professor, Technology
Real creativity, according to Elaine Polvinen, is the ability to design something fresh and exciting within specific constraints.
Polvinen, associate professor of technology, joined Buffalo State's faculty in 1991 to teach fashion and textile majors to use computer-aided design (CAD) technology. Back then—an eon ago in computer time—Buffalo State had purchased four CAD stations at a cost of a quarter-million dollars.
Polvinen had to learn how to use them herself, but that's a task at which she's proficient. "The first computer I owned," she said, "was an Apple IIe, connected to a weaving loom." Polvinen, who was a graduate student at the Rochester Institute of Technology at the time, laughs at the memory.
"I sold a red Corvette to buy it," she remembered. "Then I had to figure out how to use it!" Those days, however, are long behind her. "I do everything on the computer now," she said, "Sometimes even the initial sketch."
The computer's impact on communication intrigues Polvinen as much as does its impact on the surface, textile, and apparel design processes. Besides expediting global production and marketing, the computer has allowed designers to collaborate no matter where they are. For example, Buffalo State fashion and textile technology majors worked with their peers at Cornell University and Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science (Philadelphia University) to design apparel for J.C. Penney and Liz Claiborne as part of a four-year grant project.
Polvinen works hard to prepare students for the job market. However, she emphasizes the importance of creativity and objects to the common perception that creative people are doomed to a life of financial struggle. At a conference sponsored by the textile and apparel industry, employers said that the industry needs designers who are highly creative as well as technically savvy.
Required technical knowledge includes not just high-level CAD proficiency but an understanding of how surface, fabric, and apparel designs can be manufactured inexpensively and marketed successfully. This includes understanding fabric properties, a subject once taught in home economics when students learned what fabrics were suitable for clothing, bed linens, or draperies.
Today, graduates with this knowledge can become designers who visit bazaars and thrift shops around the world seeking inspiration. Polvinen noted that, although many manufacturing jobs in the textile and fashion industries have moved offshore, products for the American market are usually designed domestically. Retail companies in particular are expanding their own private labels.
Polvinen herself demonstrated the interweaving of creativity and technology when she built a Web site to collaborate with Shen Li, professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing, to develop an exhibition called Inspirational Chinese Designs: East and East Interpretations. Both Shen and Polvinen, and later Yi Meei Wang of Fu Jen Catholic University, in Taiwan, developed designs based on decorations and fabrics created in the past by cultural minorities in China. The physical exhibition has been seen in Beijing, Buffalo, and Hsinshuang (in Taiwan); a digital exhibition for the Web was also developed.
