E-textiles Digital Design and Fabrication

想象一下，未来的计算机可以织进你的衬衫袖子里，缝在你的枕头上，织进你的围巾里，或者绣在你最喜欢的夹克上。除了软件，编码和数字数据，该项目独特地专注于物理制造和制作新颖的交互式有形物体。硬件原型并不总是使用电子传感器、电机和LED。相反，我们可以创新具有计算特性的新材料，如织物，皮革和其他纺织品。这项研究将探索一种创造交互式日常事物的替代方法，即利用电子纺织品数字设计和制造将智能材料融入纺织品中。这些材料包括形状记忆导线和聚合物、导电线和纱线、光纤、软电子产品和变色颜料。 在本研究中，我们把材料科学创新的驱动线到一个新的背景和适当的做法，作为线程。这种技术和手工艺之间的桥梁使智能材料能够使用电子纺织数字机器（如缝纫机，刺绣机，毡制机和分层机）嵌入。这种方法拓宽了技术原型的可访问性，并有可能实现以前无法实现的新的可能性。例如，我们可以创新形状变化的可穿戴设备和颜色变化的服装，作为辅助技术的手段，以支持包括残疾人在内的边缘化群体。 这就需要革命性的物质性、交互性和制造方法，以实现未来的智能可穿戴设备和家居用品，从而影响加拿大人和世界各地人民的生活。从这个意义上说，新一代的情境感知可穿戴设备和智能纺织品可以出现，即，可以根据穿着者的偏好和需要改变尺寸的衣服，可以根据时间或社交事件改变外观的配饰，以及可以以交互方式一起通信的服装。 在NSERC RTI的支持下，拟议的研究将使用数字设计和制造设备开发智能纺织品的突破性技术，并创建下一代交互式可穿戴设备，以应对这一新兴设计领域的挑战和机遇，为我们提供实现未来辅助技术的最强手段。我们建议建立一个电子纺织品制造的总体框架，以支持不同的人在日常生活中，并扩大他们的互动可穿戴设备和软装饰的潜力。借助最先进的制造实验室，我们可以构建完全交互式的物理原型，探索这个设计空间，并激发一个社区，设想软界面如何从根本上改变我们的生活方式。这项实践研究将培养高素质的人才，掌握当今全球市场上备受追捧的尖端工具、交互设计技术和数字制造方法。

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.