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.
Example gelatin-based fibers produced using our biofiber spinning machine.
Smart textiles combine electronics with traditional textile forms, showing great promise in creating soft and flexible interactive systems for human-computer interaction and robotics. However, they also present significant sustainability challenges as they merge two substantial waste streams: textiles and electronics.
We wrote a paper in the hopes of contributing to sustainability efforts by focusing on the integration of biobased materials that are biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable in the design of smart textiles. We introduced a Desktop Biofibers Spinning Machine to enable smart textile innovators to explore biobased fibers (i.e., biofibers) and envision applications in sustainable smart textiles.
A diagram of the parts used to create the machine.
The paper cited below describes the machine’s design, a usage walkthrough, considerations for fiber spinning, and an exploration of various formulations to make gelatin biofibers. We provide several examples of biofibers integrated into smart textile applications. Finally, we discuss lessons learned from working with biofibers and the unique opportunities our machine brings to the fiber design space in Human Computer Interaction and beyond.
Team: Eldy Lazaro, Michael Rivera, Mirela Alistar, Laura Devendorf, Miles Lewis, Lily Gabriel. A collaboration between the Unstable Design Lab, Living Matter Lab, and Utility Research Lab.
Citation: Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Mirela Alistar, Laura Devendorf, and Michael L. Rivera. 2024. Desktop Biofibers Spinning: An Open-Source Machine for Exploring Biobased Fibers and Their Application Towards Sustainable Smart Textile Design. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 856, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642387
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
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.
We have now released most of the content in the post below in the form of a residency catalog. You can view the catalog Online or Order a Physical Copy at Blurb.com.
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 withIrene 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.
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.
Part of the research in the lab involves publishing new research in the area of human-computer interaction, specifically as it relates to ongoing integration of craft techniques and engineering practices. Our most recent research, completed in collaboration with Kathryn Walters, Marianne Fairbanks, and 2022 Experimental Weaver in Residence, Etta Sandry studied how the AdaCAD software we have been developing brings about new drafting practices to weavers.
What is Parametric Design?
Recent versions of AdaCAD have implemented the framework of parametric design to the context of woven draft making. Parametric design isaform of design that creates dataflows between different parameterized operations that generate new outputs, in this case, weave drafts. Changing the parameters and/or elements within the dataflow directly changes the outcome. To put it another way, parametric design has you create and connect together different operations that result in drafts, rather than describing each pixel within a structure directly. For example, the “invert” operation takes an input draft and flips the value of all the interlacements. The “stretch” operation duplicates all of the interlacements in a pic/end the number of times specified.
What operations do, then, is math on drafts. They take a draft as input, modify it in some user specified way, and spit out a new draft. More and more complex drafts can be created by chaining many operations together. In the example below, we create a series of operations that arrange different regions of satins next to each other. The designer can then change the satin structure, or width of the regions, to suit their weaving style or ensure clean edges between satin regions. AdaCAD will also calculate the number of pics needed such that the two satins will repeat at the same intervals when woven.
Making Custom Operations
With each collaborator, we developed a custom operation in AdaCAD to support their specific interests or practice.
With Kathryn, we made an operation that converted her existing notation for layer relationships in a textile into a dynamic operation that could map structures onto those relationships. The notation system assigns each weft to a system (a, b, c or d) and each warp to a system (1, 2, 3, 4). Pairings of warps and weft system can be grouped and assigned layers by putting them in parentheses. The first parenthetical group represents the top /front face layer and each subsequent group represents a layer below. Kathryn then connects structures into the different layer groups to determine the structure of that layer, independent of the others. AdaCAD takes care of the drafting that ensures they are on the correct systems and layers.
With Marianne, we developed the “all possible structures” function that uses the principle of combinatorics to systematically discover every possible combination of lifted and lowered heddles in a 4×4 structure (and there are 10s of thousands of them). AdaCAD lets you browse through every possibility, which Marianne started weaving on a shaft loom to study the effects of the different structures.
and with Etta, we developed a series of tools in AdaCAD that support direct-tie looms as well as techniques for sampling across the width of the cloth. The variable width sampler operation, shown below, allows you to use letters and numbers to describe the tiling of structures across the width of a draft. In the image below we have a20 b40 a20 c40 a20. Assigning tabby to a, and the structures to test to b and c, Etta could create and dynamically resize structural regions so that she could repeatedly weave them with different materials and study the effects.
Parametric Design asWeaving Notation
Through this research, we made an argument that parametric design could be best understood as a notation system for complex weaving that can help weavers formalize and document their draft making processes to both themselves and to other collaborators. It sparked our interest in notation systems more broadly, from sheet music to Fluxus event scores, to woven drafts, and how they foreground certain elements of the making process while leaving others to be considered at another time. And while it takes a bit of brain gymnastics to rethink drafting in this manner, it did come with some interesting new possibilities, for instance, to integrate different algorithmic processes into the design and to greatly lower the amount of time required to make quick changes to ones draft.
Taking significant inspiration from the Penelope Project and Ellen Harlizius-Klück’s article “Weaving as Binary Art and the Algebra of Patterns“, we felt like one of the primary benefits of a parametric design approach to weaving notation is to foreground the inherent algebraic nature of weaving to new audiences in a similar vein to how Harlizius-Klück argues that the jacquard punchcards made the algebraic thought processes of weavers legible to the designers of industrial machines. Notations, in this way, manifest the tacit in incomplete but rhetorically useful ways. In our case, it shows how weaving, and weavers, are performing incredibly complex operations using their own bodies, materials, and minds. It also represents these logics in a framework that is increasingly familiar to those in engineering design.
We are incredibly excited about this project, and the ability to collaborate with weaver’s whose practices continue to inspire us and we would like to continue developing AdaCAD to support weavers. If you are interested in learning more, you might consider attending one of following (or looking for talks recorded at these events) or just getting in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
Upcoming Events
April 22-28 Laura will present this research at the CHI Conference in Hamburg Germany
June 23-25 Laura will lead a panel with Kathryn Walters, Marianne Fairbanks, and Etta Sandry about AdaCAD at the Digital Weaving Conference.
June 26 We’ll host a AdaCAD Workshop at the Cleveland Public Library for those interested in attending.
Play with AdaCAD
Its free and always available online at adacad.org
Read the Full Paper (its just a pre-print now and will be published in May 2023):
We’re hosting a free workshop for anyone interested in learning more about AdaCAD on June 26, just after the Praxis+Practice Digital Weaving Conference. At the workshop, we’ll introduce AdaCAD and provide one-on-one support on how you may integrate it into your practice.
This In-Person workshop will take place June 26 from 10am – 12pm at the Cleveland Public Library, Martin Luther King Jr. Branch and will be Facilitated by Laura Devendorf and Shanel Wu.
Registration and attendance are free and optional, though, we’d love to see how many people might join so please register just to help us plan 🙂
About AdaCAD
AdaCAD is a free and open source tool for drafting. It is a research project of the Unstable Design Lab that is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation. Our goal is to discover new software for draft making that (a) supports complex weavers and (b) facilitates collaboration between weavers and engineers. To do so, AdaCAD foregrounds how draft making is deeply computational and algorithmic.
About the Workshop
At the workshop, we intend to introduce AdaCAD on a shared screen to show its functions and walk through a draft making activity. We will invite participants to follow along on their personal laptops (and can provide a few laptops for those who cannot travel with theirs). We will answer questions, provide one-on-one support, and take feature requests for anything you’d love to see the software doing 🙂
What is Open-Source
AdaCAD is an open-source software project which means that all the code for running the software is made available for anyone who would like to build onto it or add new features themselves. Because the project is currently supported by the National Science Foundation, we are able to offer it for free. You can play with the software online at adacad.org, preferably with the Google Chrome browser.
Our experimental weaving application process has concluded and we are happy to announce that our 2023 Experimental Weaver in Residence will be Elizabeth Meiklejohn. We have also extended an invitation toKathryn Walters to join us in Fall 2023 as an extension to our residency program that focuses on collaborations with students currently studying at other academic programs.
This year, we had a much smaller, but very high quality set of applicants. This resulted in us combining the shortlist and finalist phases by focusing on the top six applicants, each of whom brought unique perspectives and approaches to our ever-evolving notions of what experimental weaving is and how we might be able to support it through collaborations across craft and engineering. We chose to work with Elizabeth for the next residency because her practice combines garment design, custom software development, woven structure and a really inspiring practice of hacking and building her own equipment to explore new possibilities for woven structure. Her aesthetic beautifully crosses the digital and physical, often playing at the intersection with simulations as much as shimmering multilayer structures. We are excited to learn from her approaches and share them with this community. She recently finished her MFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design and will be joining us in February 2023.
Kathryn Walters
One of the hardest parts of the residency selection process is choosing only one person, and we’ve been looking around for ways we can grow the program. In this spirit, we extended an invitation to Kathryn Walters to join us in the Fall as a kind of research exchange. Kathryn is currently a PhD researcher at the Swedish School of Textiles who elegantly pushes the boundaries of woven structure, her work demonstrates techniques for self-shaping, shape changing materials and structures. You can learn more about her (amazing!) practice by viewing her talk in this year’s experimental weaving talk series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSEAEPUOC1o. Kathryn will be visiting the lab in Fall 2023.
Stay posted for more updates from the residency and a future call for 2024 artists in residence. We will also continue our experimental weaving talk series next year to feature some applicants from our process and to bring broader attention to the practices of experimental weaving across the world. In the meantime, we have published all shortlist applicants, finalists and committee members who have provided permission below.
This program has been funded by the National Science Foundation under grant # 1943109.
Lucy Smyth is Fascinated by stubborn materials and challenging structures. Her mathematical explorations spans costume and weaving, focusing on texture and form.
Inspired by biology and structure, Melanie Olde is an Australian-based researcher and weaver, who investigates movement and sensory experience in three-dimensional cloth.
Applications for the Next Experimental Weaving Residency are Now Closed
Spring 2023 : Cross-section
The Unstable Design Lab is hosting its third experimental weaving residency with the goal of developing new techniques and open-source resources that can co-evolve fiber arts and engineering practice. Our annual theme, cross-section, speaks to our ongoing interest in growing community at the intersections of craft and technology. As such, we look to this call to not only select a resident, but to identify a group of like-minded folks with whom we can collectively define the commitments and possible societal contributions of experimental weavers. As such, we invite interested parties to attend a series of experimental weaving talks we are hosting this Fall.
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 inspired by challenges currently faced by engineering researchers. For example, shape weaving techniques for creating form-fitting and/or compression garments for counter-pressure spacesuits, integration of power harvesting diodes, compostable or easily reusable textile structures for zero-waste manufacturing, or structures that dynamically fold and unfold to support mechanical structures or soft robotics (to name a few, but not all, possible spaces for experimentation). Applicants may wish to review our recent projects to get a stronger sense of the interests and values of the group. Applicants should be open-minded, curious, and above all deeply knowledgeable about woven structures and their behaviors. No knowledge of computer science, electronics, or engineering is required for participation.
Timeline
Application Deadline
August 30, 2022
Notification to Selected Applicant
October 1, 2022
Residency Dates
12 weeks between Jan 15-May 15
Resources
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 and knitting equipment in the lab, access to traditional and novel weaving materials, programming support for some custom software needs AdaCAD, access to the fabrication facilities at the ATLAS Institute, access to motion-capture and high-end audio equipment in the B2 Center for the Media Art and Performance. While we can provide instructions for getting started on the TC2, the artist is ultimately responsible for the design and production of their swatches—there is no technician devoted to realizing the work on the equipment.
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, Mikhaila Friske, Sasha De Koninck, and Shanel Wu as well as undergraduate researchers. We will work in close partnership with Allie Anderson’s Bioastronautics Lab, specifically with her PhD student Ella Schauss
Expectations
The resident will be expected to work at least 30 hours per week with the lab members and collaborators evolving concepts that address the artist’s interests as well as the engineering teams’ needs. The selected resident must be willing to share any techniques they develop as open-source resources to both the collaborators and public more broadly, including producing necessary documentation for others to replicate their techniques. To facilitate the exploration of projects of mutual interest, the organizers will schedule meetings with various researchers during the first week of the residency to better understand their needs and challenges when it comes to integrating textile structures into their research. The resident, then, will be able to select the challenges that most interest them to further explore, sharing their findings with the research teams as they develop.
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 should take place between January and May 2023 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 due to current current restrictions given COVID. 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
History
2019: The first iteration of this residency ran for a 6-week period in summer 2019 with support for the center for craft materials-based research grant. The resident, Sandra Wirtanen, and collaborator, Katya Arquilla, focused on the development of techniques for weaving dry electrodes for physiological monitoring. During the residency term, Katya and Sandra worked closely to sample different methods for producing a shape fitting garment with integrated electronics as well as different structural explorations of woven electrodes. The results and outcomes are documented in several formats here.
2022: After taking a delay for COVID, we changed the residency structure to allow for a longer time for the resident and our team to work together during the regular university semester. We also decided to focus more on ideation and play as opposed to the production of a single concept outcome. Our next residency began in Jan 2022 with our selected weaver, Etta Sandry. While the residency was postponed to Fall 2022, we worked closely in the first month to produce instructional materials related to woven structure and its potential applications to engineering research. Those results can be found here:
