E-textiles Digital Design and Fabrication

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Imagine future computers that are woven into your shirt sleeve, stitched to your pillow, knitted into your scarf or embroidered on your favourite jacket. Apart from software, coding and digital data, this project uniquely focuses on physical fabrication and making of novel interactive tangible objects. Hardware prototyping is not always using electronic sensors, motors and LEDs. Instead, we can innovate new materials that have computational properties, such as fabrics, leather and other textiles. This research will explore an alternative approach to creating interactive everyday things, which is to utilize e-textile digital design and fabrication to incorporate smart materials into textiles. Such materials include shape-memory wires and polymers, conductive threads and yarns, fibre-optics, soft electronics, and colour-changing pigments. In this research, we bring material science innovation of actuating wires to a new context and appropriated practices, as threads. This bridging between technology and crafting enables smart materials to be embedded using e-textile digital machines (such as sewing, embroidery, felting and layering machines). This approach broadens the accessibility of technology prototyping and has the potential to enable new previously unrealizable possibilities. For example, we can innovate shape-changing wearables and colour-changing garments as means of assistive technology to support marginalized groups including people with disabilities. This calls for revolutionary materiality, interactivity and fabrication methods to enable future smart wearables and homeware that will impact the lives of Canadians and people worldwide. In this sense, a new generation of context-aware wearables and smart textiles can emerge, i.e., clothes that can change their size based on wearer's preference and need, accessories that can change their appearance based on temporal or social events, and outfits that can communicate together in interactive ways. With NSERC RTI support, the proposed research will use digital design and fabrication equipment to develop groundbreaking technologies for smart textiles and create the next generation of interactive wearables addressing the challenges and opportunities of this emerging design space, which offer us the strongest means through which to realize future assistive technology. We propose building an overarching framework for e-textile fabrication to support different people in their everyday life and expand the potentials of their interactive wearables and soft furnishing. With a state-of-the-art fabrication lab, we can build fully-interactive physical prototypes that explore this design space and galvanize a community that envisions how soft interfaces can fundamentally alter the way we live. This hands-on research will train highly qualified personnel on cutting edge tools, interaction design techniques and digital fabrication methods which are highly sought after skills in the global market today.