Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Computing Fabrics”.
Crew, Oh cool., YOEL FINK, It’s exciting to really change the aesthetics of technology.. If you think about it, people today have to sort of almost choose between aesthetics and beauty and technology.. Those are orthogonal directions. What’s happening now, is these two worlds are coming together. And this class is preparing students to be able to combine the world of aesthetics, specifically expressive, fabric construction and design and the world of devices and computation.
MARYAM ALJOMAIRI, Most of the powerful ideas And most of the powerful projects and research really comes in these in-between spaces and these in-between domains – and this is exactly what this class is doing. Textiles – are something that we interact with every day in terms of interiors or furniture or even clothing.. I think there’s a lot of potential in utilizing textiles across scales, and how can we start to make these textile smarter and responsive at a fiber level, ELLIOT YARWOOD Fabrics, almost mimic materials in a way where you have various different length scales that all come together to Create your overall structure and your final product., The biggest thing with textiles, is that a lot of the times all the different fibers in your clothes are just made up of a single fiber.. Maybe there’s like polyester and cotton mixed together, but at the smallest scale, just that individual strand of fiber, it’s just one material., I think that’s what this class is sort of bringing to the forefront of our attention is that even just by adding a few materials you Can really exponentially increase the complexity of what you’re able to achieve with that material and how you’re able to eventually use it.
YOEL FINK, The meaning of fabrics, is changing now, for the first time in history., The fabric is going to be a computer.. The fabrics are going to do for us everything that our smartphones are doing and a lot more. And the reason they could do a lot more is because they really cover the surface of our body.. And if you want to really understand your health better and get early warnings of changes in your health, we’ve just published some work on fabrics that could help listen to help hear for people that have impairments in hearing fabrics that could listen to the unborn..
And so what we’re doing is converting the fabric from just being what it has always been to something that plays a very meaningful role in our lives. JULIETTE MARLON. So we’ve been making fibers for many years.
And inside of them we add their functionality.. So this fiber, for example – it is a battery, so you can connect it to a device and power, a device with it. And now the challenge is: how do we really integrate them into fabrics. And we can draw elastomer materials, so this fiber can really stretch., But Once you add other materials into it, materials that are typically too rigid like a metal electrode for example. Metal doesn’t stretch.
So I can’t pull this fiber or I’m just going to break the electrode inside., So we developed a process that allows you to after you draw your fiber make your electrode wavy, give it buckled shape so that you can then pull on your fiber and the fiber. Will be stretchable., YOEL FINK? You know this class is an MIT class, but in fact it is the child of a very deep collaboration between myself and MIT and the Rhode Island school of design.. We don’t have any real courses or a lot of knowledge at MIT. At this point on fabrics. And the collaboration with Rhode, Island school of design help us learn about fabrics and themselves, learn about computation and programming.
MARYAM ALJOMAIRI, The RISD students have been an incredible resource, including Elizabeth who’s, the TA of the class. They bring in a lot Of knowledge related to knitting and textiles and how to operate as well, the knitting machine. ELLIOT YARWOOD. I didn’t even think about the fact that there are people that are majoring in textiles. And I think it’s really fascinating to see just how skilled everyone is., Something that seems like impossible just knitting. A very simple sample is just incredibly easy to them.. It’S really fun to be able to work with them and sort of play to everyone’s strengths, to create like a really interesting product. Back 5 seconds.. Now, let’s say — YOEL FINK, The concept of computing fabrics is envisioning, a very different future.. Yes, fabrics are still going to be the closest things to our heart. They’re, still going to be as soft and as beautiful as they have always been., But now they’re going to take on a whole new meaning.
They’re going to be providing value to us. That has never before been seen. .