Toward Electronic Textile Gaia:
Ubiquitous Computational Substrate
Across Scales
New smart materials and digital fabrication technologies have modernized and pushed forward textile design, fabrication, and applications. Textile's physical and functional properties can now be tuned at the resolution of a fiber, a particle coating, a loop structure, or a multi-dimensional knit layer. These textiles can be fully customized from the micro, meso, to macro-scale and computationally designed and fabricated to form a seamless and functional sensate skin. Patterns, colors, texture, thickness, elasticity, breathability, conductivity, and other electromechanical parameters can be engineered through fiber-fabric structures or material choices.
From neural probes, clothing, upholstery, to building skins, fibers and textiles are truly a ubiquitous interface. My work and vision are to develop and integrate electronic devices and functional fibers seamlessly into various fabric formwork and structures and develop applications that can help us to better understand our physical and physiological patterns, actively respond to our needs, and immerse ourselves with the environments.
Figure: Imagined Electronic Textile Gaia as physical-digital mesh and nervous system, in which fabrics and fibers take on electrically active functions in-body, on-body, across the built environment, submerged within landscapes, seascapes, and extending out to our orbital and even our interplanetary infrastructure.
Featured Work
To see more research projects, visit my MIT Media Lab page.
