Lana MacKinnon studied at Edinburgh College of Art, where she was a contemporary of Eduardo Paolozzi, and obtained a Diploma in Design and Crafts in 1945.

Lana created fabrics for both fashion and interiors, working for Cresta Silks, Horrockses and Ascher before her career was cut short by her death at the age of 44.

In 1946 Lana was included in the ‘Britain can make it’ exhibition in London, where she showed with other prominent designers such as Ernest Race.

A member of the Royal Scottish Society of painters, Lana also specialised in book illustration, most notably Margaret Lusty’s ‘The Foundations of our Society’ 1966. Her designs are being reproduced with the permission of her two sons Nicholas and Christopher Gilmour.

At Classic Textiles we accurately recreate textile design classics of the 20th Century using state of the art digital printing technology. With the consent of the designer or estate, the designs are faithfully reproduced onto a linen union base. The collection was launched in 2003 with 12 designs by Lucienne Day and is being continually expanded.

This new scheme from the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) is aimed at building relationships between SMEs (Small to Medium sized Enterprises) and HEIs (Higher Education Institutes) in Scotland.

The project’s aim was to develop a new collection of digital prints on cashmere. The challenge here, was not only for Iona in designing the new prints, but also for the CAT team to prepare and print such an expensive base fabric to receive the digitally applied dyestuffs. The final collection has been showcased at various national and International events.

All images courtesy of Iona Crawford

In October 2008, CAT began working with Timorous Beasties on a collaboration funded by the UK Technology Strategy Board. In response to the theme: ‘Exploiting Digital Technologies’ the purpose of the BeastiesLAB project was to explore the potential benefits of a digital workflow based on the idea of co-creation. This involved the development of a retail installation that invited customers to create their own cushion by interacting with Timorous Beasties print designs through a playful experience that brought their content to life. With products being digitally printed at CAT only once a customer had purchased the product, this on-demand approach offers greater flexibility and reduced risk for designers whilst providing customers with a unique product (and memorable experience). Aside from these commercial benefits, the focus of the project was to explore the creative opportunities enabled by co-creation.

In order to ensure customers did not feel as though they were ‘using a computer’ the interactive scenes were controlled using a Nintendo Wiimote with colourways being selected using printed swatches with embedded RFID tags. The video below shows the final concept.

BeastiesLAB: Design from TechStyleLAB on Vimeo.