Slow Technology & Maggie Orth’s Message

26 April, Cambridge, MA_Maggie Orth  artist and technologist, of International Fashion Machines and  MIT Media Lab PhD spoke at the MIT  Design and Computation Group Lecture series today.  She showed many of her double woven, color changing textiles in photograph and video  to show both texture of the textile and video to show the temporality of the textile pieces.  This video snagged from’ blip.tv’ the website shows her piece titled Running Plaid, 2007.    It is unedited and shown at 20% increase in speed.  The piece is made of cotton, rayon and conductive yarns as well as silver ink and hand printed thermochromic inks.

If you have ever traced a shadow line across the floor wall or other surface as the sun traveled its path over a day you can get a sense of the speed of the color change.  The change is at first imperceptible but as you start to look the change is so minute but so fast you do not even know that it has changed.  In the case of the shadow, the edge has already moved from your pencil position as you start.  This is similar to the effect experienced in Turrell’s work Skyspace in Houston link here: http://skyspace.rice.edu/cms/the-commission/ .  The speed of Orth’s color changing woven textiles, take a person back to a slower more modulated time. Lars Hallnas and Johannes Redstrom write about this type of reflective temporality in the article ‘Slow technology:  designing for reflection’ the reference link is here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/PL00000019

Embedded in this temporality of natural things  is a question about how things return to the earth.  How should designers and artists account for a recycling of composite materials, microchips and other toxins that cannot be recycled?  What are the ways in which designers and artitsts can  invent ways that these new materials can be re-purposed, remade, recycled?

Computational Textile Events in November

Hello, if you are interested in computation and textiles, there are three events in the Boston area the early part of November that you will want to attend.

The IFAI is in town, or the Industrial Fabrics Association International from Nov. 6-9th at the Boston Convention Center.  There are many interesting programs concerning building and textiles.

On Friday 9 November, 9:30am- 12:30pm  I have organized  a seminar at the IFAI fair titled From Building to Body:  Current Research Into Interactive and Technical Textiles. A Panel of 5 speakers from MIT, OCAD U Toronto and the GSD at Harvard will present and discuss their works ranging from the architecture to affective wearables. Here is a link: http://www.ifaiexpo.com/Architect_Green_Roof.cfm

Monday,  5 November – 14 November, Exhibition titled  Patterning by Heat:  Responsive Textile Structures.  Keller Gallery, MIT School of Architecture and Planning,  Building 7-408.  Heat activated knitted textiles will be presented by myself and collaborator Delia Dumitrescu, PhD Candidate at the Swedish School for Textiles in Boras, and Chalmers IT. The gallery is open M-F 9am-6pm, and by appointment.  Here is a link:  http://architecture.mit.edu/computation/news/patterning-heat-responsive-textile-structures

Saturday 10 November there will be a hands on workshop, High Low Tech Lab, 5th Floor MIT Media Lab. 1pm-4pm titled Textile Sketches: Heat Fused Textile Demonstration.  Delia Dumitrescu and I  will show participants how the fabrics in the exhibition work and many additional samples. Participants will make their own patterns.

All are welcome to attend any of these public events.  See you there!

Electronic Weaving: Textiles and Mind

Reverse Side Charlieplexed Textile Map of the U.S.

How many things hold what we remember?

The theme of this year’s Sigradi 2011 held in Santa Fe Argentina 18-20 November chaired by Mauro Chiarella and Maria Elena Tosello , looked at the question of Augmented Culture and the intertwining of digital and physical space that create a new fabric of life, and perhaps a new  concept of mind that determines how  people interact today.

As a way to understand the idea of a mind, which was proposed by Marvin Minsky in his book the Society of Mind, the Sensing Touch:  Soft Architecture project presented at Sigradi, is a prototype for a conductive knit curtain that sensed nearness or absolute touch on the curtain and output the distance in various patterns of led’s on the curtain panel.  The panel also had soft solar film strips that captured energy to help power the output.  The paper is posted at Sigradi or CuminCad.   In this project,  mind, is expanded as it were to the textile itself creating a feedback loop between it and a person’s skin.

Here is a video of the Sensing Touch Curtain:

Sensing Touch Curtain Open from fadstudio on Vimeo.

A second paper Telephoning Textiles:  Networked Soft Architectures was also presented and looked at how a textile could become an indexing agent.   A textile map of all 50 states in the U.S. indicated by a led, was lit up according to the area code of the cellphone that was calling it.  An electronic weaving technique was used to expand the register pins of the microprocessor, in this case a Lilypad 328 from Sparkfun.  This made it possible to light up all 50 led’s one for each state in the U.S. using the 14 pins available on the Lilypad.  This paper is also available through the Sigradi or CuminCad website. Below is an image from the Telephoning Textiles: Networked Soft Architectures paper.

Textile Map Accessed by Android

If one of the foremost uses of textiles to make buildings can be considered that of constructing a social space, then a textile that connects one mind to another mind is the making of a physical digital social network.

Some of the most interesting issues that came up in the discussion during the Sensing Touch Curtain presentation were making it possible for other people to plug into or connect to the sensing touch curtain project, that it could not only be a understood as a curtain but seen as a mobile patchwork quilt that allowed connection with others, and that different events could be sparked off the interaction.  A kind of Interactive Gees Bend quilt that changes the look of technology and how it is accessed.  Here is a link a website showing the quilts. http://www.auburn.edu/academic/other/geesbend/explore/catalog/slideshow/index.htm, but it may be best to just google images for the quilts to see the remarkable panoply of designs together.

Upcoming:  Form Active Structures Workshop for the Industrial Knitting Course at the Swedish School of Textiles in Boras Sweden  between 6-10 March.

I will also present a lecture titled  Soft Architectures  at the Design Seminar Series on  6th  March.  More information at the link.

More on this later…

Textile Logics: Designing Structural Membranes

Python Powered Textiles

Matters of Tension and Compression within Geometries

Woven Half Sphere_Computational Textile_Boundary Stretched

Model_Weave

Issues of tension and compression seems to be thematically recurring in the process of developing these printed textiles works.  Above  is an  ABS 3d printed model created with the plain weave script from the PointCrowd RhinoPython workshop run by Ari Kardassis and Masoud Akbarzadeh in January 2011.  Many of the tension and compression issues stem from the phenomena of what I call getting gauge.   It is that trial and error part of getting the right tension on a knit textile for example to meet the size requirement for a sweater or blanket etc.   Geometrically for this diameter pipe or  yarn, this is about the maximum distance the outer boundary can stretch from this specific original sphere before the piped surface starts to twist along the spine of the curve and warp the circular section of the pipe.   This behavior makes for zero sectional thickness in the 3d digital model, and cannot be printed.   This first experiment had a very simple version of piping that is computationally much lighter.  This pipe script works, up to a limit.  In this version of this model, the piping or yarn does not intersect at the weave crossings on this model, but the geometry of the sphere holds the separate woven strands together.

Compression of Single Link Textile

Model_Link

The single link scripted model above was printed as a flat, rectangular model, as you can see with no boundary return along the open ends of the strand, permitting this model a way to slide diagonally  in the xy plane to have different states of density.   Each of the strands is also free to rotate in the z direction allowing for some curvature parallel to the direction of the strand.

Knit Half Sphere_Detail

Model_Knit

This is a model of interloping or knitting and presented the most issues with the pipe or yarn torquing into nothing,  it required a new pipe script to get it to print at all.   The section on this model is true and circular.   The script is computationally much more demanding in terms of what it needs to track, but you get good results in the section of the yarn.   It is posted here,  thanks to Skylar Tibbets for help with solving the twisted pipe.  This was made with some intersections in the yarn, but geometrically will hold together just fine if the yarn does not self intersect.  The “ApplyCurvePipe” command in Rhino yields beautiful pipe results,  especially for the knit curves and  I have an update from Pascal Golay at McNeel.  You can use   ”ExtractPipedCurve” to get a nice meshed curve from CurvePipe object that can be exported to an stl file.

Knit Half Sphere_Interior

Model_Make

Having made these physical models,  I think the most useful model is the script, that can be used repeatedly to look at many different kinds of things both physically and digitally.   These textile samples are neither surfaces nor bones  and can reside somewhere in between, because you can push the script to be either/or if you so wish.    These qualities have meant that it has been possible to look at these models as outer perimeters or skin and as  structure.  This kind of model does not require one kind of outer boundary or shape but is made up of many interelationships of parts that can then be formed for multiple purposes.

Experiments to continue…

Thank you to Chris Dewart and Seth Hall at RPL for use of the ABS printer.

Fabric, Plastic, Heat

Katryna Carter's Snap Lamp Cover

 

 “Are you listening?  PLASTICS”.

This week, thermoplastics seemed to be the theme and a way of making textiles more rigid and stiff to use them in ways that allowed for a change in scale or connecting architecture or industrial design and textiles in most interesting ways.   Here is an Industrial Design thesis project and part of Kelly Dobson’s Textile Futures Course by Katryna Carter at R.I.S.D. that recycles old t-shirts to make snap together lamp shades. The snappy shades are a product that is produced in a community outreach program in Providence,( also designed and run by Katryn) that teaches teens about industrial design.  The t-shirts are coated with plastic sheets that are then melted to the fabric in a large press like machine and then shapes are cut from the newly coated textile in a laser cutter.  The resulting lamps are quite sturdy and strong, and grow organically as they are snapped together.  I appreciated how this project not only considered design of the object itself, but also the design of the social community space surrounding that object.  The whole project set up reminded me of a quilting bee, an improvisational riff emanating from each lamp.   This project and many other provocative works in design are on view at the Rhode Island School of Design Graduate Thesis show in the Rhode Island Convention Center 12pm-5pm until 5 June 2010.

 

Katryna Cater Snap Lamp Cover

A second project the Zero House shown at the Thermoplastic House Workshop run by Mark Goldthorpe at MIT’s School of Architecture, featured thin skin fiberglass textile composite as a way to quickly produce low cost, durable housing for Haiti.  Scaling up here is a panel produced in collaboration with Construction Solutions in Amesbury, MA that has a polystyrene core that provides not only stiffness, but also the insulation requirement for the house.  The panels are joined at the seam by a biscuit like piece also made of a folded piece of composite.  The workshop explored ways that the house could be made entirely of this thermoplastic coated fiberglass using the existing production machines in the Construction Solutions factory.  Ultimately the entire house would be panels seamed together by the biscuit type joint. What is really great about the house is that it is parametric and can be designed by others to suit their needs.  It is envisioned by the workshop group that the house is produced by a fablab on site, so remaining to consider as part of the design is how others in situ communities interface with all the great programming tools used to produce the house. Also fantastic was the fact that the group collaborated with a Sustainable Life Cycle team out at Stanford to see how the Zero House stacked up against conventional concrete block construction, the results were favorable for the Zero House.

 

 

Automated Fiber Placement Robot Constructing Fusilage

Starting off the Thermoplastic House Workshop Michael Silver presented his work on Composite Architectures:  Engineering Complex Fiber Placed Structural Membranes for Sustainable Building Applications.  Michael showed his work using Automated Fiber Placement, AFP to place thermoplastic tape like material in patterns along a mandrel creating a light and stiff beam for use in buildings. This is the same method used to make a single piece fuselage for this Hawker Beechcraft 4000 Jet, eliminating the thousands of parts and fasteners typically used to construct jet bodies.   Using one material and a single process to drive the design of the piece Michael Silver has discovered simply by layering the material one can create gradients to accommodate different structural capacities as well as meet different lighting requirements. Also impressive is the great synopsis of the potential sustainability of this particular method.  Here is a link to the report on his work funded by the Boston Society of Architects Research Grants.   Definitely worth the time to read it through.

http://www.architects.org/documents/education/researchgrants/2009/langone-report.pdf 

(The image of the fusilage is from http://www.mmsonline.com/cdn/cms/Viper%20machine%20%202.jpg)

We are 43 years post The Graduate and we did go into plastics big time, but it’s the plastic leftover that troubles us now.  Does it never go away?

What kinds of plastics are good to use and can be reused more than one time? What kinds of energy goes into making these?  If you know drop a line.

Grassy Textiles

Edwina Portocarrerero’s Grass and Silicon Textile

This is a non woven piece by Edwina Portocarrero  made of silicon and fresh picked grass for the New Textiles course taught by Leah Beuchley at the Media Lab at MIT. In this picture taken on April 14^th, it is one day old, I will be taking pictures of this over the next month to see what happens.  Maybe it will decay, but then again, the silicon is coated rather generously on it, so maybe not. Stay tuned.   It’s a totally flexible textile so you can wrap around curved surfaces, fold it, and make other interesting shapes with it, and because the silicon is water proof, depending on the thickness it could keep water out if you wanted it.  This one has a porous back, and has a beautiful transparency to it, and it smells really great .  If you are allergic to grass, you will definitely sneeze it’s the real thing.   

 

 Surface Landscape_Programmable Grass_Felecia Davis

Surface Landscape develops the idea of merging building and landscape together,  compressing   an element of the domestic landscape to the surface of a building envelope.  It makes the technology of how we cultivate our  landscapes explicit.    This green wall is made up of small pixilated units of grass in which each unit of grass can be programmed and fed with different nutrients to change the color and texture of the grass.  A sensible feedback loop can be made with the surrounding environment, and information from the wall back to to the programmer can happen over the course of different months, allowing  calibrated adjustment.

Detail Surface Landscape_Grass Wall_ Programmable Feed Tubes_Felecia Davis