Categories
Uncategorized

Loom Pedals

Loom Pedals are an open-source hardware/software interface for enhancing a weaver’s ability to create on-the-fly, improvised designs in Jacquard weaving. The Loom Pedals include a set of modular foot pedals that communicate between a TC2 digital loom and the AdaCAD software. Shanel Wu led the project with the support of an OSHWA Trailblazers Fellowship and will present this research at TEI 2024.

The loom pedals enclosure and hardware. The hardware communicates foot presses to a server that updates the design software and sendings the modified pick to the TC2.
The loom pedals communicate with a “player” in AdaCAD that update the design that is currently being woven.
We envision this system offering more than just presses. Like guitar pedals, we imagine different ways that knobs and sliders could be augmented during weaving to bring the playfulness of treadles the complexity afforded by jacquard weaving.
Categories
Uncategorized

Towards Mutual Benefit

This project aims to form connections across design research labs in human-computer interaction who are hosting artist residencies as part of their research activities.

A group of us met in July 2023 in conjunction with the annual conference on Designing Interactive System to share our insights and strategies for supporting “mutual benefit” when engaging artists in our research practices. You can view the full list of participants and outcomes at:

https://unstable.design/mutualbenefit/

Categories
Provocations

Experimental Textiles Student Projects

Experimental Textiles is a course developed to support our research on collaborations that blend engineering and craft. Students from across CU, at grad and undergraduate levels, can join the class to learn about woven textile structure and techniques for integrating movement or sensing (no prior experience in weaving or electronics is necessary). Students create final projects that explore a concept of their choosing and create at least 4 iterations of that idea before selecting their “final” swatch to document in the class swatch book. We showcase some of the great work from 2023 below.

All course materials, schedule, and resources can be found at extx.unstable.design

Switch Or Swatch

Creative Industries Masters Student Ashley Ebbert created this swatch on an 8-shaft table loom that explores multilayer weaving to create thumb-sized pockets that act as switches when pressed to the base cloth.

Ashely Ebbert, @amebbert
Ashely Ebbert, @amebbert

Light Diffusion + Blue Tarp

MFA student Natalie Thedford continued her material explorations of blue tarp but unpicking its tabby structure in patterns that would reveal different patterns when held to the light.

Natalie Thedford, @nat.thedford_studio

Woven Lenticulars

Creative Industries Master’s Student Sasha Paulovich took inspiration from double weave to create structures that pull open and closed with monofilament and reveal different colors when turned in different directions. She woven these pieces on an 8-shaft table loom.

Sasha Paulovich @sha_longbao 

Sophia Huseby

Undergraduate Sophia Huseby created a textile to support fidgeting and tactile play by integrating beads and wire into stripes through the cloth.

Sophie Huseby, @sophiahuseby 

Yuchen Zhang

Creative Industries Master’s Student Yuchen Zhang went above and beyond on her cricket loom to reinterpret Starry Night into an interactive textile with a color changing moon.

Yuchen Zhang, @yochen0730

Mimi Shalf

Creative Technology and Design PhD student Mimi Shalf explored cyanotypes in cloth and made prints generated by different weave structures.

Mimi Shalf, @pamimus

Caleb Loewengart

Creative technology and design undergraduate Caleb Loewengart explored color shifting by integrating leno structures into multilayer cloth.

Caleb Loewengart, @caleb.loewengart

Categories
Uncategorized

A Table Weaving

Setting up the installation for a Table Weaving, open Dec 6-8 2023 for community participation.

A Table Weaving is a collaborative project that creates space to make sense of and meditate upon the energy and physical infrastructures required to power the “cloud”. Community members were invited to join the space and encode data into cloth via weaving while listening to an ambisonic soundscape. The event ended with a public celebration where we invited audience members to join us in finishing and unveiling the tapestries created during the community weaving for discussion.

Community members were invited to follow lift plans that specified the number of repeats based on the values in the data set.
Participants came though the space for 2 days and spend about a hour on the looms translating the patterns into cloth.
At the final closing event, we cut off and revealed the cloth. The piece in the foreground encodes data about the total size of data stored on the cloud from 2010 and projected into 2025.

Collaborators

Laura Devendorf (she/her)

Laura Devendorf is an assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute and the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder where she works and teaches at the intersection of engineering and critical design. She directs the Unstable Design Lab, where she works closely with artists, students, and researchers to develop both provocations and software for textiles design.

Jacqueline Wernimont (she/her)

Jacqueline Wernimont is Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. As a digital media scholar who specializes in mathematic and computational media and their histories, her work includes creative-critical making of multisensory immersive works which she describes as data visceralization.

Steven Frost (they/them)

Steven Frost (they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at CU Boulder and an interdisciplinary fiber artist. Their research focuses on textiles, queer studies, pop culture, and community development in public spaces.

Brook Vann (they/them)

Brook is a new media artist based in Boulder, Colorado. Brook explores gender and queerness in their work through motion-capture, sound design and data analysis. They use these various technologies to better understand the abundant and subtle translations between body, space and movement and how they affect gender performance. They have received an MFA in the Kinetic Imaging department at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2021.

Support

This work was made possible through the B2 Creative Residency Program and Dartmouth’s Digital Justice Lab.

Categories
Uncategorized

Call for Entries

Information Session Recording.

2025 Experimental Weaving Residency

The Unstable Design Lab is hosting its fourth experimental weaving residency with the goal of developing new techniques and open-source resources that can co-evolve weaving and engineering practice. Our theme for the 2025 residency, Expanding Experimentation, speaks to our desire to expand how we think about “experimentation” in weaving, looking beyond complex structure to invite explorations around politics, textility, and materiality of weaving. To consider, for example: the politics of craft/technical knowledge within material practice; how weaving animates different stories about technology; legacies of craft as they are felt across different bodies and geographies. 

The chosen resident will work with the Unstable Design Lab, as well as researchers from the ATLAS Institute and University of Colorado more broadly, to create a series of swatches and/or resources that take up the theme of “expanding experimentation” in varied forms that can be deployed, adapted, and engaged by a broader public. The key outcome of this residency should be knowledge that can emerge between the resident and the Unstable Design Lab researchers, that can be shared in various forms such as publications, exhibition pieces, open-source recipes, software files, and/or work books.

Timeline

Information SessionJanuary 9, 2024 @ 12:30pm MST.
Register Here
Application DeadlineFeb 18, 2024
Notification to Selected ApplicantMarch 31, 2024
Residency Dates12 weeks between Jan 15-May 15, 2025

Resources

This residency is best suited to applicants who are comfortable leading their own design and creation processes. While we are happy to share our skills and equipment, there is no dedicated technical support provided to the resident.  The resources available to the resident include a desk in the Unstable Design Lab, priority access to a TC2 digital jacquard loom (3W warped at 60 ends per inch), access to other weaving, spinning, sewing, and knitting equipment in the lab, access to traditional and novel weaving materials, programming support for some custom software needs in AdaCAD, and access to the fabrication facilities at the ATLAS Institute

To help facilitate potential collaboration around shared interests, the organizers will schedule meetings with various researchers during the first weeks of the residency to help the resident form connections and identify the key themes and challenges of the lab. As a collaborator in the Unstable Design Lab you will be working among artists and researchers across many domains of research. You would share immediate lab space with PhD students Deanna Gelosi, Eldy Lazaro, Etta Sandry as well as undergraduate researchers Lily Gabriel and Caleb Loewengart. 

Expectations

  • The resident will be expected to work at least 30 hours per week evolving concepts that address the artist’s interests as well as the curiosities and topics of the Unstable Design Lab team. We expect residents to work in-person, within the lab as much as they are able.
  • With the resources provided, we hope that this is a generative experience for the resident with outcomes that may include swatches, finished works, performances, events or workshops, etc.
  • The selected resident must be willing to share any techniques or resources they develop as open-source/publicly accessible documents to both the collaborators and public more broadly. This often includes the production of a catalog to commemorate the residency. 

Stipend, Housing and Timeline

Stipend*$9520 USD
Airfare Reimbursement$450 USD
Materials**$500 USD

* the stipend will be taxed by the US government and this may have significant impact for international applicants

** materials budget does not go directly to artist, but is to be spent by the lab during the residency on supplies determined by the artist.

The residency scheduling is flexible but should total 12 weeks, taking place between January and May 2025 in Boulder, Colorado. The resident will receive $9520 as a stipend, $450 towards airfare to and from Boulder, and a materials budget of $500. The artist will be responsible for locating housing and travel to and from the university. International applicants are welcome to apply but should note that the stipend will be lower due to taxes taken by the US government on international workers. 

A Note for International Applicants

We welcome international applications. If you are of non-US citizenship, please make note that the stipend will be particularly affected by US taxes on international workers as well as some fees for VISA processing in your country of citizenship. As we reach the later stages of the application process, we may use this information to provide you with more specifics on the taxes you may incur as well as verify with the host university that you would be eligible to work within the institution. We can provide flexibility in the residency dates to support applicants who may be facing additional challenges obtaining a VISA and/or traveling to the US. For more information on the particular program through which we host residents, visit: https://www.colorado.edu/isss/cu-departments/hiringhosting-international-students-scholars/international-scholars-j-h-e-pr/j-1-3

Organizers

Laura Devendorf
Director of the Unstable Design Lab
Assistant Professor, ATLAS Institute
& Dept. of Information Science
website

Steven Frost
Faculty Director of the
B2 Center for Media Arts & Performance
website

Etta Sandry
Former Experimental Weaver in Residence and
PhD Student at CU Boulder
website

Selection Committee

The selection committee and organizers will work together will determine the finalists. The organizers will ultimately select the chosen resident.

Bukola Koiki (she/her)
Conceptual Fiber Artist and Educator
www.bukolakoiki.com
social: @bukolakoiki

Marianne Fairbanks (she/her)
Associate Professor of Design Studies UW-Madison
mariannefairbanks.comweavinglab.comhelloloom.com
social:@mariannefairbanks, @weavinglab, @helloloom

Sarah Rosalena (she/her)
Assistant Professor of Computational Craft and Haptic Media,
University of California, Santa Barbara
www.sarahrosalena.com
social: @sarah_rosalena

The application window is now closed.

Categories
AdaCAD

AdaCAD

AdaCAD is an experimental workspace that applies parametric design to the domain of weave drafting. It supports algorithmic and playful approaches to developing woven structures and cloth, for shaft and jacquard looms.

We currently support upwards of 140 registered users and the tool has been integrated into weaving curriculum across arts and engineering. We are actively maintaining and building on it, adding new features and responding to requests from the community.

Use it online at
adacad.org

Documentation and Learning Resources
https://docs.adacad.org/

How To Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy2lIjrar_02XiqfJG8kLpeWOyCtDXeFJ

Project Team:
Laura Devendorf, Mikhaila Friske, Shanel Wu, Emma Goodwill, Deanna Gelosi, Etta Sandry, and Caleb Loewengart.

Publications

Laura Devendorf, Kathryn Walters, Marianne Fairbanks, Etta Sandry, Emma Goodwill. AdaCAD: Parametric Design as a New Form of Notation for Complex WeavingIn Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-18. 2023

see also: Parametric Design as Weaving Notation

Mikhaila Friske, Shanel Wu, Laura Devendorf. 2019. AdaCAD: Crafting Software
for Smart Textiles Design.
 In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 345, 13 pages

see also: AdaCAD: The Beginnings

Categories
Experimental Weaving Residency

Experimental Weaving Residency

Established in 2019, the Experimental Weaving Residency is a program that hosts weavers in our research lab for up to three months with the goal of creating resources and techniques to share with a broader community. Each Fall/Winter, we will open a call for residencies for coming year.

Kathryn Walters

2023 (fall)
topics explored: actuating over-twisted cellulose yarns. Bio-inspired design.

Elizabeth Meiklejohn

2023 (spring)
topics explored: electromagnetics, cloth, partial weft structures, light scattering, soft sensing, lattice structures, collaboration with Irene Posch

Etta Sandry

2022
topics explored: sampling as method, waffles, self pleating structures, felting, sampling club.

Sandra Wirtanen

2019
topics explored: dry electrodes, elastics, integrated electronics, routing wires through cloth.

Categories
Provocations

Bits and Threads

This project aims to explore the connections between weaving, culture, and computing in collaboration with educators in informal learning and making spaces. Read more about the project here: https://outreach.colorado.edu/program/bits-and-threads-weaving-cultural-worlds-and-computing-in-community-based-settings/

This image shows several people in a room looking at and playing with table top and floor looms.
Facilitators from the Denver Public Library and Denver Clubhouse Network play with looms at the Unstable Design Lab.

Collaborators: We are working locally with ideaLABs at Denver Public Library and Denver Clubhouse Network sites

Team Members: Ricarose Roque, Laura Devendorf, Steven Frost, Mimi Shalf, Celeste Moreno. A collaboration between the Unstable Design Lab and Creative Communities Research Group.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the CU Boulder Office of Outreach and Engagement

Categories
Uncategorized

Experimental Textiles Course Curriculum

Student crafted electrical connectors using household objects.

We’ve been fine tuning the content for an introductory course at CU Boulder called “Experimental Textiles”. The course introduces those unfamiliar with weaving to how woven structure can be usefully deployed to improve or otherwise augment electro-mechanical systems. It introduces those familiar with weaving to basic principles of electro-mechanical systems that can be harnessed in woven cloth. Topics include resistive sensing, electromagnetic actuation, and integrating color change with resistive heat or UV exposure.

Follow along for yourself here: extx.unstable.design

Categories
Experimental Weaving Residency

2023 Residency in Review

An animation showing the flaps opening and closing.

The 2023 Experimental Weaving Residency, featuring Elizabeth Meiklejohn, has come to a close and left us with new understandings about electromagnetics and cloth movement.

The 12-week residency took on the challenge of actuating, which is fancy for moving, a piece of cloth though a combination of complex structures and electrical components. The project emerged organically as we shared some ideas and ongoing projects of the lab with Elizabeth, who took a fondness to the idea of cloth that could hold two distinct states (e.g. a flap opened or closed, a cell extended or collapsed). With this in mind the first 4 weeks focused on a wide array of structures that we could imagine having two-states (known more broadly as bi-stable mechanisms), next, we joined forces with Irene Posch to think through how we might use electromagnetic coils to push and pull the cloth in different directions. We ultimately set ourselves a challenge to create an exhibition piece that showcases electromagnetic movement of a cloth. We added a challenge that the cloth needed to be woven in one piece with all electronics embedded into its structure. 

Two electromagnets are inserted into each flap. The electromagnets are then controlled by a web-based interface, allowing you to “play” them.
The cloth with all the flaps closed.
A video showing our interactions with the interface and the cloth in realtime.

By approaching programmable movement as a provocation, this project explored fabric elements capable of oscillating between two states. Collectively, we used our knowledge of weaving, electronics, and programming woven drafts to generate a series of samples that fold, flap, and collapse before arriving at a vision for an interactive textile component. The prompt: reimagine Posch and Kurbak’s 1-bit embroidered controllers within the vernacular of woven structure. The result, an e-textile woven in a single piece that, when removed from the loom, can be cut apart into flaps. When connected to electronics and a custom interface we built to control its motion, the cloth performs gestures. This lets the fabric behave like rustling, flickering and slow rhythmic opening and closing, suggesting a passage of wind or sunlight across the piece bringing it to life.

A detail showing the hand-made electromagnetic coils integrated into the back of each flap.

Each flap is controlled by two electromagnetic coils, one at either side of the flap. A strong neodynium magnet is also integrated into the base structure, directly under the coil when the flap is closed. When the coil is powered, it produced a magnetic field which attracts it to the neodynium magnet. When the wire that forms the coil is connected to power it becomes attracted to a magnet, and thus the flap closes and the cloth appears white. When power is disconnected, the attraction no longer holds and gravity opens the flap, letting light bounce from the flap’s bright orange interior onto the base cloth, creating a warm neon glow – effectively changing the color of the fabric in a large-scale, structural manner. 

Through close collaboration and extensive prototyping, we developed weaving strategies in which disparate elements – neutral base, neon flaps, copper coils – are fully integrated into a single-piece fabric on the loom. Designing a woven fabric that not only contains actuators, but lends itself easily to actuation through zones of rigidity and softness, was an equally important part of this process, developing from conversations with engineers and designers in our lab. We centered diagramming and process documentation throughout our collaborative process, maintaining a record of “design bookkeeping” that led us through iterations in coil form-factor, neon color composition and weave structure, finally converging as a color-shifting, actuating woven fabric.

In the following sections, we’ll break down the project into its components, photos of all of our samples, ideation, and methods are included in the 2023 residency catalog (coming soon_.

Sampling

To get started thinking through ideas and concepts, we began sampling in two directions. The first explored structures capable of collapsing and springing back into shape. And the others drew from the research in the lab on force sensing textiles to explore different structures that could sense pressure. While there are so many to explore, we’ll focus on one sample from each direction. 

An overview of all the samples produced during the residency.

Exploring Lattice Structures

This sample was my (Laura’s) personal favorite in the way that it held dimension and stretch, reminding me of a little sea creature walking along the ocean floor. Elizabeth designed it as a four layer structure of overlapping curves, such that, the binding points between the layers are made only from the layers passing through each other. Elastic floats are inserted between layers 2 and 3 to pull the lattice open. Laura translated this into AdaCAD to understand and communicate the structure to other weavers. 

Each sample Elizabeth created for the Residency was also carefully tagged with information about its structure and construction.

Sample 7b – EWR 2023
4-layer lattice with elastic floats, 0 offset
Techniques: multi-layer, shrinking floats
Weft 1 (w1): 200 tex bonded nylon
Weft 2 (w2): black elastic
Base: plain weave in w1, 15 epi per layer
Floats: w2 running through the center of the layer stack, not interlacing with anything. 

Because Elizabeth uses a weaving software called PointCarre, we explored how we might make the same structure in AdaCAD using the layer notation feature and offer it to this audience for reference and play.

Try it in our Beta Version of AdaCAD: https://adacad-beta-fa4dc.web.app/?ex=sample7b

Or learn more about how to create this structure: https://docs.adacad.org/docs/howtouse/sample7b

Making Force Sensors from Pile Weaving Techniques

The principle of resistive sensing guides many e-textile projects. This form of sensing happens when fibers (specifically metal fibers) make contact with each other when they are subjected to external pressures. The closeness of the fibers changes the material’s resistance, which can be measured by a computer. If you’d like to read more about this phenomena, we wrote a paper about it with our former experimental weaver in resdiency Etta Sandry. While we have been using felt as a force sensing structure, Elizabeth experimented with structures that would pile the metal yarns in loops on the surface of the cloth such that when they are not pressed, the loops remain isolated from each other. When they are pressed, the loops collapse and change resistance. 

a swatch that tests four different conductive yarns. The one on the far right was most successful.
A detail showing how the structure piles the conductive yarn off the surface. When it’s pressed, the little loops press on each other, creating a short circuit through the yarn and resulting in a change of resistance.
This video shows resistance changing on a multimeter when the cloth is pressed. You’ll see the numbers go down when pressed.

Understanding Movement

To understand how the cloth might move, we repeated instructions provided to us by Irene Posch which allow you to use an electromagnetic coil and strong neodymium magnet to produce movement. To test this, we created our own coils (e.g. about 200 loops of 36AWG magnet wire around a Boba straw (sourced from the cafe downstairs). We stitched the coil to a cloth and put a strong magnet on top of it, attached to another cloth. When we attach the ends of the coil to a 9 Volt battery, it repels. If we flip the ends of the coil when we connect to the 9V, it attracts. 

one of the coils we tested. This one was made with 200 turns of 40 AWG magnet wire.
We attached each end of the coil to a electrical lead. When we touch the leads to a 9V battery, the magnet was repelled by the force, creating a fluttering movement.

Elizabeth tested a bunch of coil shapes and sizes to study their effects, and to see what kind of movement we could induce upon a magnet in a cloth. Simple helical or spiral coils create push-and-pull actuation; arrays of multiple coils can create side-to-side sliding actuation when powered in a specific sequence. Ferrous metal cores increase the strength of cylindrical electromagnets, but had no effect on our flat versions.. Handmade coils inevitably have overlaps where successive wire wraps cross each other, diminishing the strength of the magnetic field.

As we researched magnetic coils, we took special inspiration from fellow e-texitles community member Cindy Harnett and her team:

We chose to maximize the number of turns that would fit in a small low-profile coil by using thin magnet wire and a solid disk form factor rather than a hollow ring. We experimented with forming coils on table and Jacquard looms, constrained by the mechanics of typical loom weaving that makes any type of circle or spiral shape highly challenging to construct. 

diagrams created by Elizabeth to explore different methods of inserting a coil into a woven structure.

Weaving is like Tetris: you can’t go back and insert more material into fabric you’ve already woven, because more recent wefts block the shed from opening in that section. A coiled wire, repeatedly traveling between the fell line (the most recent part of the cloth that’s been woven) and a previously woven section, would be difficult to weave without breaking or bending some of the foundational rules. Adding supplementary wefts, whose motions are more like knotwork or embroidery than weaving, was one strategy to fix the coil to the cloth. Another approach (shown in variation 3) was to weave the coil within the cross-section of the fabric, rather than on its face, as a doubleweave tunnel. These precisely choreographed movements, and the wire coil’s continuity, are only possible on shuttle looms.

Want to make some of your own coils – you can try these steps:

Prototyping Cloth Movement and Structure

To help us understand what we needed from our coils, we decided that we must develop them in the context they would be used. From sampling and testing, we had some notions of what we might explore, and considered a cloth with multiple flaps. We decided to integrate a bright color on the back of the flap to amplify the visual effects of the flap moving.

Our first prototoype of the flap structure, created with muslin and rip-stop nylon.
we pinned coils onto the flaps to test their weight and how they might animate the opening and closing of the clap.

We began exploring the vision for the final piece by mocking up our concept in muslin and stitching orange rip-stop nylon to the back of each muslin flap. We would hand sew on different magnets and electromagnets to explore what might happen, how far we could get a flap to move. The general finding is that the stronger the magnet, the more the force of attraction and repulsion, but also the heavier the cloth. This meant that we needed to embed the magnet in the base cloth rather than the flap to eliminate the weight it would cause. 

Translating into Woven Structure

We began translating this structure to the loom by exploring partial weft insertions that, when worked back and forth across the loom, would create flaps in place.

This piece is worked from the bottom to top edge on the loom, woven in one piece, so the flaps open in the direction of the weft. You can see if you look closely that we experimented with different structures for the orange flaps to minimize the appearance of orange on the surface of the flap, and maximize on it on the back of the flap. Ultimately, we found the flaps to be too rigid. The insertion of the flaps in the weft direction created too much weft yarn movement in the joints. 

These are Elizabeth’s design files used for understanding how to implement the flaps along the weft direction by moving partial wefts sequentially to the right and left in different segments across the width. 

We explored different materials and also different colors, as well as integrations for the magnetic wire used in the coils in the next sample, but the flaps, still felt too rigid. 

To ease the stiffness in the joints of the flaps, Elizabeth turned the design by 90 degrees, making flaps in the warp direction instead of weft. This design ultimately gave us the movement in the flaps we were looking for, but also made us add a section above each flap that needed to be “cut” to release the flap from the backing. We cut and finished these edges. 

The Final Product

Elizabeth weaving the final piece, in 4 minutes.

We initially used nylon monofilament, combined with undyed cotton, to lend stiffness to the fabric but found it too rigid and a bit unwieldy to work with. Instead, we shifted toward a “kitchen-sink” weft with many yarns bundled together, eventually choosing a mix of bleached and unbleached linen, paper and raw silk. Thin elastic yarn was briefly tested as a supplemental warp to help flap hinges snap closed, but we moved away from this idea when we rotated the design for the final iteration. Neon polyester sewing thread, strong neodymium magnets and 40-gauge magnet wire (copper with an enamel coating to prevent coils from shorting) were selected to maximize the visual impact and actuation strength of the fabric.

During the weaving process, we integrated the coils and long ends of the coils into the cloth itself, pulling them all to the top left corner of the cloth for each connection. Again, boba straws came in handy, as Elizabeth attached each long and very delicate string of magnet wire to a tape covered straw segment to manage the wires while weaving. Coils were integrated and then taped in place to hold them during the rest of the weaving process. 

Screen capture of us showing all the little coils Elizabeth was working with. Irene is impressed. Elizabeth is hidden behind, the cardboard and coils : )
Working the cloth
a detail of the electromagnet and cloth integration.

We can also see small bobbins of wire being worked through the warp here using the technique we’ve found in the lab to be most robust for routing, simply adding a pic or weft system designated to picking one end every so many wefts and slipping the supplemental wires under the raised ends at those points. This process allows one to gradually carry the traces through the cloth while ensuring they are firmly embedded into the cloth structure itself. 

Here you can see how the wires follow the edge of the cloth structure. 

To finish the piece, Elizabeth cut the flaps to release them from the base cloth and finished their edges. 

After the flaps were cut and finished, the final outcome emerged: 

Programming and Electronics

Laura took the lead on programming an interface to control the coils, as well as the electronics to route power to each coil. We’ll share our design here for those who might already be savvy with microcontroller platforms like Arduino and the basics of working with transistors to control high-power components.

While we aspire to a custom PCB, we used this breadboard based circuit to test and control the electronics.

The electronics include: 

  • Sparkfun Thing ESP 32 Microcontroller Board
  • 16 N-Channel MOSFETs (
  • And AdaFruit Boost/Buck Power Controller 
  • 16 10 KOhm Resistors

1 MOSFET and one resistor are used to control power to each coil. The MOSFET works by acting a low voltage switch (controlled by a digital pin on the ESP32 board), to open a channel for a high-voltage/high-current stream of power required by the coil. The barrel jack means we can plug it all into the wall and the Boost/Buck converter makes sure to regulate the wall power to the level used by the Microconroller. 

The most difficult part of the circuitry is perhaps just getting the cloth to have stable connections without breaking any of the 32 incredibly fragile magnet wires extending out of the cloth. Elizabeth and I approached this by weaving our own ribbon cables and hand sewing the magnet wire from the fabric to the cable to form stable connections. Each ribbon cable had 16 silicone coated wires woven into the structure. We created 2 such cables, 16 to attach to one end of the coils, and 16 to attach to the other end. The pattern for the ribbon cable used a few pics of tabby in cotton, before attaching the wire as a supplemental weft using a satin stitch. 

Before attaching the wires, we threaded each magnet wire through the plastic header usually used for electronics connections, though, with the metal tines removed. This essentially created one little “hole” for each wire that would be spaced in standard spacing as other electrical components. This also let us organize the wires, making sure that we were keeping track of coil 1, 2, 3 and so on. 

We stripped and soldered the tips of each wire integrated into our cable, before twisting them together with the stripped ends of the magnet wire. Using no solder, we fastened the connections in place by folding the twisted wires back on themselves and stitching any exposed metal down with thread. It worked quite amazingly and created really strong and stable connections. 

Because we used an ESP 32 board, our fabric could talk to the internet. In fact, it has its own website, where interactions upon the website control the movement of the cloth (if it is plugged in). This was accomplished using a connecting a simple Angular website to a web-based database, specifically, a Firebase Realtime Database. The ESP 32 is also connected to this database, and listens for changes which occur when someone selects flaps to open and close on the website. You can find all the code at: https://github.com/UnstableDesign/Flappable

We loaded the interface on a tablet to showcase how touching regions on the interface closes the associated flaps. Voila! Thanks Internet. 

A detail view of the interface used to control the cloth.

There is so so so so much content, ideas, and inspiration generated through this process. So much so that it’s taken us over 3 months just to put this blog post together. At the same time, we have been designing a catalog to print and offer to the community and preparing the piece for exhibition at Textile Intersections in London on Sept 20, 2023.  Please follow us on Instagram for more updates. 

A preview of the residency catalog, coming soon!

Acknowledgements

This Experimental Weaving Residency has been supported by the National Science Foundation Grant #1943109. The project was a collaboration led by Elizabeth Meiklejohn, Laura Devendorf and Irene Posch with support from the Unstable Design Lab and ATLAS Institute more broadly. Special thanks to Hunter Allan-Bonney for Photography support and Deanna Gelosi and Atlas Zaina for preparing the “Magnetic Reverberations” for installation and shipping.