"how can design research explore the possibilities and pitfalls of new textile technology?"
The Social Fabric is a design driven research project conducted as part of the Creative Industry Scientific Programme (CRISP) into Smart Textile Services (STS). As Research Associate for Design Academy Eindhoven, I’ve collaborated with researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology for a year to generate knowledge on smart-textiles and their meaningful future application.
The world of crafts is rich in meaning and depth because of crafts’ very social character and its firm position in culture and society. To give similar meaning to smart-textiles we can learn from craftspeople about how they share and evolve their practice. Social Fabric identifies ways to bring the age-old skills and wisdom of craftspeople together with the new technology and ingenuity of engineers, creating new narratives for smart textiles.
This proces was described in an academic paper and the publication “The Social Fabric”.
The world of crafts is rich in meaning and depth because of crafts’ very social character and its firm position in culture and society. To give similar meaning to smart-textiles we can learn from craftspeople about how they share and evolve their practice. Social Fabric identifies ways to bring the age-old skills and wisdom of craftspeople together with the new technology and ingenuity of engineers, creating new narratives for smart textiles.
This proces was described in an academic paper and the publication “The Social Fabric”.
research
With Social Fabric I researched how perspectives on value and meaning could influence the development of smart-textile applications. When studying how technology had changed textile practices over time, I compared the long slow evolution of textiles and the recent rapid development of technology. I proposed that the ‘social fabric’ of pre-industrial textile manufacturing drove the evolution of the material and gave textile purpose, meaning and symbolic value over time. Creating a similar social context for smart-textile products could infuse them with purpose, meaning and value. This idea was tested and developed by both organising and participating in workshops around textile crafts and soft-electronics.
In the workshops I invited researchers, design and engineering students and textile and technology developers, to create a collaborative 'smart' patchwork with me. Each participant made a patch that represented a piece of knowledge on textile or technology, and connected or reacted to someone else’s patch. Each new patch added to the interdisciplinary body of knowledge. The patches could be shuffled around and rearranged to collectively explore possible meaningful future applications of smart-textiles. |
By approaching new technological possibilities as if they were a craft, playing with electronics as if they were raw material and tinkering with textiles as if they were technological components, meaningful applications can be created bottom-up – driven by users. We can design and facilitate the conditions that stimulate this process and take inspiration from different ways of exchanging insights about textiles and technology.