SPP Designer Spotlight: Suzanne Oude Hengel
Thinking outside the socks, Suzanne Oude Hengel creates footwear by using circular knitting machinery in new ways.
The Santoni Pioneer Program, or SPP for short, aims to ease communication between the different sectors of the textile industry. SPP gives knitted apparel designers the unique opportunity to receive training and access to the latest Santoni technology and technicians over a span of two months in Shanghai, China.
We’ve previously written about one of the program’s promising designers, Queenie Cheng, here. For this article, we’d like to place the spotlight on Suzanne Oude Hengel, a similarly talented designer who specializes in footwear and also took part in Santoni’s Pioneer Program.
Hailing from the Netherlands, Suzanne Oude Hengel is a knitted textile researcher, programmer, and footwear innovator. She graduated in 2015 from ArtEZ University with a major in product design. Oude Hengel looks fondly back on the opportunity she had to participate in an exchange program at Aalto University in Finland, where she learned the basics of knitting. Fast forward to the present, and she is the founder of her own knit development and consultancy studio, called Knit in Motion [KiM]. You’ll find Oude Hengel working on a variety of machinery including the latest flatbed and circular knitting machines.
For Oude Hengel, part of the appeal of knitting is the technical aspect of it, which intrigues her to think bigger and expand her horizons. She also relishes in attempting to push the boundaries of the materials and the machines she works with to create something new. She wants to rethink the manufacturing process and aims to reform it by using unconventional techniques to improve upon existing methods.
Wanting to know just what makes each machine tick, Oude Hengel is fascinated by their limitations and lets this inspires her to innovate. She enjoys removing a machine from its usual context and determining if it can be used in a different way to achieve unique results.
Her untitled collection, which she brought to life while she was in the Santoni Pioneer Program, is a direct outcome of her passion for toying with the ordinary and transforming it into something outside the norm.
For this project, the starting point was simply a tube and the shape of a sock. Working with circular knitting machines provided her with a different way to think about shape. Oude Hengel’s goal was not only to create exciting designs but also to display new possibilities from the machines. She also observed textile-based problems and aspired to seek out solutions for them. Thus, the collection was born.
Oude Hengel’s collaboration with Santoni allowed her to show that it is possible to use a circular knitting machine for applications other than merely producing meters upon meters of socks.
One might wonder why Oude Hengel opts to design footwear. She explains that she has always been interested in functional design as well as problem solving. For her, footwear sits neatly at the cross-section of her two interests and draws out her creativity. Footwear presents a unique challenge in that not only does it need to be functional, but it must also be aesthetically pleasing as well. On top of both these things is the fact that you are working with such a limited space.
The Santoni Pioneer program encourages its designers to innovate by complementing their natural design process. Oude Hengel notes that she is a very hands-on kind of designer. While she is designing, she is always next to the machine she plans to be working with. She “sketches” her ideas directly onto the machine and works through them by trial and error.
When asked what she considered to be the greatest takeaway from SPP, she replied that it was the importance of working next to the machine. Being able to talk in the same programming and design language as the technicians also aided with her design process. Oude Hengel comments that these two aspects of the program stuck with her and remain a core part of her business even today.
SPP allows designers to grow, not by holding their hands and guiding them every step of the way, but by supplementing them with resources and bolstering their creative process. In addition to giving designers free reign over their design process, Santoni also provides SPP participants with direct access to engineers and technicians so they can talk through potential flaws in the design. Armed with the ability to spitball ideas with peers and walk through problems, SPP designers are able to work efficiently and bring innovative products to life.
At MEC, we’re all about welcoming innovation and love to create (take a look at MyKnit) as well as help others create in the textile space. Taking a page from SPP’s book, we’re rolling out our Materialliance platform with the goal of connecting people from all areas of textile production. Here, designers can show off their lookbooks and brand reps can find suppliers with a click. We hope Materialliance inspires collaborations that enable textile lovers to go from ideation to creation.
Interested in learning more about the Materialliance community and how it can help you? You can take a look here.