softcircuit
I’m a textile designer currently specialized in e-textiles for interior and fashion. Here you can have a look on my works, materials related to sensitive and intelligent textile and interesting projects made by other designers. to contact me : juliesallin@hotmail.comViva swiss e-embroidery!! Forster Rohner and the CO2 Dress
The swiss embroidery company Forster Rohner in collaboration with the Danish Design School, Alexandra Institute and diffus.dk creatad a beautiful e-dress that can sense the amount o CO2 in a given environment and react by lighting some LEDs stiched into the embroidery. All the circuit is “soft”, using the Lilypad Arduino and conductive threads.
Fragile interactive textiles
Today I saw a post on Fashioningtech which presents some beautiful and delicate creations of a certain Zuzana Serbak.
Delicately dangling from a shirt pocket or wrapped around one’s wrist, Zuzana Serbak’s fabric sculptures are inspired by the concept of “fragile conductivity.”
In her wearable art, Serbak embraces LEDs more for their ephemeral materiality (light) rather than computational capability (display). Serbak takes advantage of soft circuits ultimate weakness — their fragile connectivity — and uses its instability as a point of interactivity.
“The circuit is so fragile that it just comes into existence when fabric is slightly touched, stretched, whipped,” Serbak says. ” Without any coding and computerization it interacts with the movement of body. When it’s directly on the skin,light reacts on subtle pulsation and breath.” The end result is delicate fabric wearables inlayed with details of lace that serve “more likely a conceptual piece of art or an experimental jewel, rather then a rigorously precise scientific application. “
I think her use of technology is quite smart and sensitive. her creations aren note based on “performance” but on poetic, which brings a contribution to the seek of new aesthetics of wearables.
e-textiles becoming a real second skin
I read an interesting post at talk2myshirt blog today.”According to a recent Technology Review article, researchers at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, the Tufts University in Medford, MA, and the University of Pennsylvania building thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates that almost completely integrate into the body.
While electronics usually has to be encased to protect it from the body, these electronics don’t need protection. During the implanting the electronics is covered in a silk like substrate which melts away over time and the thin silicon circuits left behind don’t cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick.
The group is developing silk-silicon LEDs that might act as photonic tattoos that can show blood-sugar readings, as well as arrays of conformable electrodes that might interface with the nervous system.
The Skin LEDs have been successfully implanted into mice and now it’s time to find volunteers for the next testing phase.
Electronic giant Philips is exploring the body as platform for electronics as well with their version of an electronic Tattoo, the SKIN:Tattoo which is stimulated by touch. Sensual navigation along the landscape of the body paints tattoo like pattern on the skin.”
So the question I ask to myself is: is it a virtual tattoo? an electronic pattern? a second skin textile embedded into the body? It could be everything, but what it’s intersting is that the philips project and the research take literally the imaginary of textile as a second skin, and here lies the magic of these projetcs.
Dynamic Curtains, a new trend?
Some months ago (see June), I talked about Florian Kraütli (who meanwhile is nominated for the Design Preis Schweiz in textile category) and his magnetic curtain.
Well he’s not the only one who is interested in dynamic curtain in this moment. First, the’re is the project of Aurélie Mossé and the team of CITA in Copenhagen which won the Création Baumann’s contest: “gecko: think forward”.
As the winners say, “Ice-fern explores the poetics of the window and how textiles can become an integral part of this ultra-thin architectural space. This transformable window geometry is a window-sculpture evolving over time.Pushing the boundaries between curtain and wall, Ice-fern is playfully drawn from one to the other. As Ice-fern is reconfigured excess parts of the curtain are shed creating a conversation between the two. As the lizard can loose its tail, Ice-fern leaves traces of presence across the space of inhabitation.
Ice-fern is three dimensional. Consolidated scales heat pressed into the gecko fabric give the fabric an integral structure. The resident can shape this three dimensionality by loosening parts of the pattern from the window surface. Changing the sculptures three dimensional configuration shifts the diffusion of light and translucency.”
The second project has been seen at the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. The project “Flowe” is from the collective KNOL. Flowe is a dynamic space-divider that reacts on human touch. “creating a more dynamic, changing and desired environment”. By its expressional forms and organic movement, Flowe can enhance different feelings and emotions that come with different occasions, and create a more dynamic, changing and desired environment.
What surprises me the most is the use of the same structure, meaning the use of a triangular shape in order to fold the curtain and so to let more or light goes through the interior space. Both of them are white or in very very neutral color, and none of them have thought to make REALLY interactive, meaning integrating technology, as sensors, to make move the curtain. A light sensor and shape memory wires would have been great medium. In that way, the curtain could have changed its structure, creating some dense or thiner areas depending on light density.
Textile Futures Research Student Group
Today I’m very glad to have found the blog “http://textilefuturesphd.blogspot.com” which brings together phd students working on the future of textiles. Alle these students come from the University of the Arts in London. They post a lot of infos, like exhibitions, workshops,and other events about design thinking. Very interesting and inspiring
some things about flexibility…
Today on MoCo Loco blog I was looking for posts about textile and I found two projects that appealed me a lot.
Both of them talk about flexibility, a caracteristic of textile that is enhanced and explored since recently. And there’s a link with how now architecture and interior design could be seen, that is to say, no more as rigid and hexagonal structures, but more as flexible and dynamic environments, corresponding the most to our dynamic social relationships.
The first project is the “pillow blanket” by Jung You. Basicly, it’s a flexible blanket made of several cushions that are sewed in such a way that you can envelopp them around you or fold in order to give the blanket different uses (blanket, carpet, cushion, etc.)
I’m glad to say that the second project is from Florian Kraütli, a swiss designer (I don’t have so many occasions to be a little nationalistic) but based in the Netherlands. “Magnetic curtain”, as its name points out, is a curtain in which are incorporated magnets that allow you to create different forms of the same curtain. The structure is origami-like and reminds me the clouds project of the Bouroullec that I really love.
Although these two projects are not electronic neither smart or intelligent, the way they are thought have a lot in common with many smart and sensitive design projects (or at least those which interest me): the flexibility, the capacity of evolve and change are recurrent parameters in the creation of smart textiles. More, they are the key of design thinking of today and tomorrow (and I hope for a long time).
How to make interactive things without coding
Aniomagic is a company that offers kits and materials for e-textile amateurs. The thing I found über cool is that they sell some sensors (light, temperature and custumable) that you can sew with conductive materials without the need of writing a programm. You just have to callibrate a button to define the threshold you like.
Another product I found very funny is the ambient temperature tapestry kit that allows you to know the outside temperature. The project consists in a simple thermometer in the form of three lights that you can hang outside. For Spring, the emerald lightboard comes on if it’s comfortable. Otherwise, the ruby light comes on if it’s hot, and the diamond if it’s cold. As the temperature changes from hot to cool, the corresponding lightboards turn on. All the instructables you need are online.
call for prototypes, wearables and soft circuit projects!!
The smart textiles salon offer the possibility to designers and/or engineers to show their invention the 25th September 2009 in Ghent, Belgium as part of the ‘80th Anniversary of the Department of Textiles at Ghent University‘. The deadline submission have been extended until the 31th May. You still have time to applicate but hurry up!
good luck!
great fun at the thermo and photochromic inks workshop at HEAD in Geneva
On thurdsay 7th May, I had the pleasure to hold a one day workshop at the Geneva University of Art and Design, in the fashion department. Students had to deal with thermochromic and photochromic inks for the first time. The aim was to discover how a textile design processus could be different from a traditional one. Many had to face with technical aspects such as light and temperature thresholds and create some “scenarios” in which the “ever changing” of a pattern could tell a story.
my conference at ENSAD in Paris, a great feedback!
Today, I’ve seen on the “Observatoire des nouveaux médias de Paris” blog that a person posted a comment about a conference I held at the ENSAD in Paris. This person,Danaé Papaioannou dedscribed my conference as “extraordinary”. Well, thank you very much Danaé!!!
This conference has taken place during a seminar called “Mobilisable”. I’ve been invited by Pr. Jean-Louis Boissier (an artist and researcher in art and interactivity) to talk about my research on sensitive and smart textiles. There, I’ve made an introduciton to all these new materials and their applications in fashion and architecture areas and my 2 prototypes “Touch_Me”. It was a real pleasure to be there and I would like to thank everyone who was there for their interest!
