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Provocations

A Fabric that Remembers

A Fabric that remembers is a fabric that remembers how and when it was pressed. It does this using 6 embedded pressure sensors and a microconroller that trasmits data to the web. It is a fabric with its own website, which you can explore here:

The fabric is currently on display at Accenture Labs in San Francisco and uses both the fabric and tablet to visualize touch in realtime. The constraint that guided the work was to get as much of the circuitry as possible embedded into the fabric. Thus, for the e-textiles nerds out there, you might be happy to know that all of the wiring for the resistive sensing and voltage dividing is embedded into the fabric by way of using different resistance yarns. We have included all of the swatches I made in preparation for the final design for reference.

Authors on this project are Laura Devendorf, Sasha De Koninck, Shanel Wu and Emma Goodwill.

This image shows the fabric as it would be rendered as a circuit. The structure consists of six voltage dividing circuits wired in parallel to a common power and ground. The first resistor is a fixed value resistor and the second is a variable resistor that changes measure with the application of force.
The fabric on view at the Center for Heritage Arts and Textiles (CHAT) in Hong Kong as part of the “Interweaving Poetic Code” exhibit.

Want to know more of the technical details?

You can checkout all of the code, interface specs, and weaving files at https://github.com/UnstableDesign/A-Fabric-That-Remembers