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Designing Dissolving Wearables

The unfolding lace top shown in two states: on the left, the knit is held together with dissolving yarn. After washing, the materials holding the knit closed dissolve, and unfold into a larger garment.

Bio-based materials facilitate the development of more sustainable devices and wearables, expanding the range of design possibilities beyond conventional materials. Our work with biofoam explores one such quality, dissolving, as a unique affordance for designing and interacting with wearables. We developed techniques to make biofoam yarns, and used them to craft three wearables: “Seasonal Footwear”, a “Reveal Bralette”, and an “Unfolding Lace Top”. These wearables incorporate sections that dissolve in water, allowing customization to suit the user’s needs. These wearables illustrate short-term use cases, such as a one-time reveal or shape change. We explore this novel design space as sustainable ephemeral fashion, where bio-based dissolving materials enable revealing, transformative, and interactive functionalities. 

Citation: Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Lily M Gabriel, Mikhaila Friske, Shanel Wu, Sasha De Koninck, Laura Devendorf, and Mirela Alistar. 2023. Designing Dissolving Wearables. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing & the 2023 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computing (UbiComp/ISWC ’23 Adjunct). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 286–290. https://doi-org.colorado.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/3594739.3610781   

Video: https://youtu.be/jbCfofXDTPA?si=652IBoYK7elQiH44 

Tutorial to make Biofoam yarns: https://www.softrobotics.io/post/how-to-make-soft-biofoam-strings-exploring-an-affordable-and-accessible-fabrication-method 

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Documentation Provocations

Designing Machines for Human-Wind Collaboration

An exploration into new mechanisms for jacquard weaving, as well as an ongoing interest in asking how non-human materials or forces can be engaged as collaborators resulted in the prototype of the wind loom—a modified tapestry loom that with every 4th warp connected to a sail that moves the warp position in and out. The fabrication of the loom was led by Jen Mah and Rachel Bork, who iterated between several prototypes for laser-cut heddle/hooks that can be attached to the yarn, arms are connected to umbrellas that can move when the wind blows, easily attachable and detachable components to support easy travel, and so on. The prototyping process was complex and frustrating, as the summer in which we prototyped was not very windy and it was hard to test in its specific working conditions we imagined for the loom. Local weaver, and friend, Julie Rodriguez, took the prototype out for a test and captured the photo above. Her approach was to wait for a gust, and then weave into the wind-produced shed with alternating colors that she chose.



The image above shows a detail of the arm design and how it connects to the warp yarns. First, a small piece of laser-cut acrylic attaches to the yarn. We cut a small “pig tail” in the acrylic to allow the small rectangular joint to be easily wound on and off the warp. That piece then fits into an arm that pivots around a post along the width of the loom. That arm has a long thin aluminum post attached to the back of it, upon which a we attach umbrellas made with nylon and 3D printed attachment joints. The length of the aluminum post determines the speed a which the umbrella will move. The longer the post, the weaker the wind. We found the weakest wind we could capture was roughly 6 mph. We originally had a second 3D printed joint between the metal post and the umbrella post (seen below) but this added to much weakness into the joint and became unruly in a wind gust.  All of our part files and instructions can be found on this Instructables post: https://www.instructables.com/id/Wind-Loom/

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Documentation Open Source

How to Weave a Sensing and Color Changing Fabric

Pressing this fabric in one of the regions marked by the rectangles leads to the segment to change colors: from dark blue, to pink, to white. The parts on the left show how we combined our threads to electrical leads for testing using notched acrylic, copper tape, and alligator clips.

This is a first prototype of a vision of a force-fabric. When integrated into a garment, this textile could capture and replay how your body made contact with other bodies in the world. Those bodies may be human, created through the experiences of hugs or holding children, but they may also be of nonhuman forces – heavy winds or couches pressed upon ones back. The concept is to think of ways technology can make us aware of how we are physically supporting and supported by other objects and environmental forces. It sees garments as a interesting surfaces of intersection between self and other.

We created this first textile by double weaving sections of color changing yarn (resistive heating wire painted with a mixture of thermochromic pigments that change at different temperatures) on the front face and then integrating conductive pads on the back or under layer of the fabric. We used a tapestry technique to integrate a second piece of conductive yarn along a segment of the warp above the touchpad such that when it is pressed it completes the circuit. The double weaving structure makes the connective “guts” invisible from the front. Thus, the textile does not invite you to touch and poke it (how would you know where to touch), it simply captures a “picture” of the different press regions.

Laura Devendorf wove the fabric on an Schacht 8-shaft Baby Wolf loom, warped at 20 ends per inch (Photo by Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado)
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