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
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.
In support of our newly developed class, we found ourselves writing a reader to explain different techniques, material sourcing and structures of textiles that could be leveraged for so-called “smart” applications (but if you read our intro, you see we get into a bit more complexity on that). This has been authored by Laura Devendorf, Sasha De Koninck and Steven Frost but it is available via Github so you can contribute as well if you so wish. You can find the complete book at the link below:
We developed a course and curriculum for teaching textile structures to an audience of students interested in engineering and physical prototyping. We have released this course, as well as our materials lists, kits, and assignments, as an open education resource here: https://unstable.design/soft-object/_book/
AdaCAD is a drafting software that we are developing in the lab. Our hope is for the tool to support both experimental forms of weaving and experimental forms of draft making that borrow from principles of generative design.
In 2017, the Unstable Design Lab received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop AdaCAD, a software tool that would facilitate weavers who needed to integrate circuitry into their design.
This post includes a transcript of our first presentation about AdaCAD, delivered at CHI 2019. In this presentation, we talk about the rationale, process, and features of AdaCAD. Long story short, we presented how we learned that providing specific support for multilayer weaving and viewing your weave in terms of the draft as well as the paths of the individual yarn types within the design could go far to support weavers, and non-weavers, entering this emerging design space.
Since giving the talk in 2018, we have contributed development and you can view our current documentation and use the tool here: https://unstabledesign.github.io/
I was in love with the fabric below and wanted to weave a similar pattern for myself. I didn’t have the tie up, but I did have the photo of the fabric, so I reverse engineered it. I found it really difficult to design the overall patterning of the stripes and tie ups at the same time so I wrote a processing script to allow me to more playfully make patterns with my keyboard, and have those generate my tie up. I released the code on GitHub so others could do the same.
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)
The string figure sensor is a concept or early prototype for a string-based sensor that can know something of its own shape. We created a proof of concept by knitting conductive thread and wool around a wire core, resulting in a semi-rigid loop that feels similar to a pipe cleaner in one’s hands. When someone plays with the loop, the crosses and knots created in it result in measurable changes in resistance. We take resistance measurements at five points along the length of the loop to create a resistance “signature” that correlates to various shapes or figures created with the string.
