Nowadays, cultural heritage is more than ever linked to the present. It links us to our cultural past through the conscious act of preserving and bequeathing to future generations, turning society into its custodian. The appreciation of cultural heritage happens not only because of its communicative power, but also because of its economic power, through sustainable development and the promotion of creative industries. This paper presents SILKNOW, an EU-H2002 funded project and its application to cultural heritage, as well as to creative industries and design innovation. To this end, it presents the use of image recognition tools applied to cultural heritage, through the interoperability of data in the open-access registers of silk museums and its presentation, analysis and creative process carried out by the design students of EASD Valencia as a case study, in the branches of jewellery and fashion project, inspired by the heritage of silk.

Silk was a major factor for progress in Europe, mostly along the Western Silk Road’s network of production and market centers. The silk trade also allowed for the exchange of ideas and innovations, having impacts at economic, technical, functional, cultural and symbolic levels. However, silk has today become a seriously endangered heritage. Although many European specialized museums are devoted to its preservation, they usually lack the size and resources to take advantage of state-of-the-art digital technologies. The aim of this paper is twofold; firstly, we introduce SILKNOW, an interdisciplinary project that has been recently funded by the H2020 Programme of the European Union in order to preserve and promote the heritage of silk textiles; secondly, we introduce a set of interactive tools related to the project.

Historical weaving techniques have evolved in time and space giving as result more or less fabrics with different aesthetical characteristics. These techniques were transferred along the main silk production centers, thanks to the European Silk Road and creating a common European Frame on themes and techniques. These had made it complicated to determine whether a fabric corresponds to one century or another. Moreover, in order to understand their creation, it is necessary to determine the number of weaves and interlacements that each textile has, therefore, mathematical models can be extracted from these layers. In this sense, three dimensional (3D) virtual representations of the internal structure of textiles are of interest for a variety of purposes related to fashion, industry, education or other areas. The aim of this paper is to propose a mathematical modelling of historical weaving techniques by means of matrices in order to be easily mapped to a virtual 3D representation. The work focuses on historical silk textiles, ranging from the 15th to the 19th centuries. We also propose a computer vision-based strategy to extract relevant information from digital imagery, by considering different types of images (textiles, technical drawings and macro images). The work here presented has been carried out in the scope of the SILKNOW project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 769504. The results shown in the paper are preliminary and will be improved in the scope of the project.

Symmetry is part of textile art in patterns and motifs that decorate fabrics, which are made by the interlacement of warp and wefts. Moreover, the 3D representation of fabrics have already been studied by some authors; however, they have not specifically dealt with preserving historical weaving techniques. In this paper, we present the SILKNOW’s Virtual Loom, a tool intended to document, preserve and reproduce silk historical weaving techniques from the 15th to the 19th centuries. We focus on the symmetry function and its contribution to art history, textile conservation, and modern design. We analyzed 2028 records from Garin 1820 datasets—a historical industry that still weaves with these techniques—and we reconstructed some historical designs that presented different types of defects. For those images (including fabrics and drawings) that had a symmetrical axis, we applied the symmetry functionality allowing to reconstruct missing parts. Thanks to these results, we were able to verify the usefulness of the Virtual Loom for conservation, analysis and new interpretative advantages, thanks to symmetry analysis applied to historical fabrics.

Design education is practical and theoretical; however, it does not usually include the study of cultural heritage. Nonetheless, relations with academia have been strong since the 18th century, when the need to educate designers spread across the continent to improve design and make it competitive in the market. In this paper, we recover that spirit and act as mediators between heritage and young people to create links and preserve cultural heritage. A case study was conducted at the Public Valencian Design School with 31 product design students. The methodology applied was based on iterative processes that allowed students to discover design and silk heritage when they proposed innovative ways of approaching it. A qualitative survey was used to evaluate the case study. The results showed that students increased their appreciation for cultural heritage (by more than 90%) as well as their willingness to preserve it and reuse it in their future creations. Collaboration between cultural heritage and design might foster sustainable conservation and mark the future steps of ongoing collaboration.