TEXTILE INTERSECTIONS is the second edition of a two-day conference and an exhibition (September 13-14) organised by the Textile Design Research Group at Loughborough University in collaboration with Royal College of Art, Imperial College London with the aim of exploring collaborations in textile design research with a focus on four main themes: fabrics and architecture, fabrics and interactions, textile materiality processes and critical fabrics. London organising chairs: Tincuta Heinzel (Loughborough University), Sara Robertson (Royal College of Art), and Rebecca Stewart (Imperial College London), check the rest of the Committee.
I applied and was accepted to present a paper titled “From smart textile to on demand, locally fabricated design“, written at the end of the research project Paramatrix funded by Worth and which will be in Eindhoven Design week in October.
The curators of the conference are interested in topics related to connections and interdisciplinary collaborations that promote research in the field of textile and textile design. Participants’ interventions focus on the nature of the collaborations that tissues can establish with other disciplines and the opportunities that arise from them. In particular, I talked about how the transversality of the Paramatrix project benefited from the context of a makerspace to be developed and how the team involved addressed the communication barriers of specialised languages related to weaving and interaction design.
During the conference, participants could also explore the work of designers and artists which applied to the call to exhibition curated by Laura Morgan, Amy Winters, Ricardo O’Nascimento, Emma Wood.
Here’s the abstract of the paper you can then download from the Proceedings page:
“In the last ten years mass production of goods has been recognized as highly responsible of having critical impact on the planet. Many companies are pushed by institutions and policy makers to embrace circular economy nevertheless new studies show that recycling is not enough, if production does not decrease. In this context a driving force for digital fabrication research is developing the ability to manufacture multiples of one without loss of complexity. This emerging approach is demonstrating that sustainable, high quality, long lasting and affordable products can be implemented through the set up of new business models based on locally manufactured, hi-tech, on demand products. Through the presentation of the results of a transnational collaboration funded by EU on design-driven services, the paper highlights a preliminary set of implications of the assumed shift from centralized mass production to a distributed micro-factory model. The workflow implemented during the project is focused on digitally fabricated items personalized through a fabrication system based on a hand-woven textile sensor matrix able to capture unique data from the body of customers. Moreover the paper describes the key role makerspaces have into enabling an interdisciplinary work environment and creating bridges between textile craft tradition and digital fabrication processes in order to lowering the barriers for design and fashion enterprises to benefit from technological textile innovation in a sustainable manufacturing environment.”
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