Biography
Susan Watkins joined the Cornell faculty in 1967. She taught flat pattern design and clothing construction in her early years at Cornell, but as the College moved from educating students to manage a family into preparing them for professions in the apparel industry, she began to introduce projects and develop courses in the more functional aspects of clothing. In 1984, she wrote the textbook, Clothing: the Portable Environment, the first textbook written to establish functional apparel design as an area of study in academia. She spent much of her time at Cornell establishing this area in various levels of the department curriculum and influencing its adoption across the country and around the world.
In her teaching, Professor Watkins worked to develop a multi-disciplinary problem-solving design process that would help students engage in apparel design from a comprehensive approach. In this process, heavy emphasis was placed on user needs, requiring designers to have a fuller understanding of the user, the activity and the environment before beginning to design. Her research focused on a wide range of functional apparel topics, including the design of chemically protective clothing, firefighting apparel, pressure garments for pilots, protective equipment for ice hockey, items of protective apparel for various branches of the military, clothing and accessories for nursing home residents, and braces for post-injury rehabilitation. As often as possible, both undergraduate and graduate students were involved in her research projects. Her former students have held jobs in the aerospace industry and at US Army and Navy research facilities. They have been head designers with major outdoor sportswear companies; lawyers specializing in product litigation; and designers of protective sports equipment. They have also formed private consulting firms, working on a wide variety of protective clothing items.
In addition to introducing functional clothing courses at a variety of different levels in the apparel curriculum, Professor Watkins also taught courses in flat pattern design and clothing construction, apparel textiles, clothing through the life cycle, drawing the clothed figure and research methods in apparel design.
Honors:
2014 Honorary Doctor of Science, University of Minnesota
2003 Biography in Encyclopedia of Human Ecology (Miller, J., Lerner, R., Schlamberg, L. and Anderson, P., eds., Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc.) Volume 2, pp. 705-708.
2000 Mack and Effie Campbell Tyner Eminent Scholar Chair, Florida State University.
1991 Fellow, International Textile and Apparel Association