openMaterials

Conductive yarn is a great material to experiment with, but it is difficult to buy in small quantities. Hannah Perner-Wilson from ‘How to get what you want‘ has negotiated with the manufacturer Schoeller to place a minimum order of 30 kilograms, and is looking for others who may want to make a collective purchase. She’s [...]

bionic yarn is a ‘new fabric made of recycled plastic bottles’ (PET). I’m loving the great ‘process’ section on the website, explaining the extrusion process and how the fibers are spun together to make the yarn.

The OpenStructures project is an open and modular construction system where everyone designs for everyone on the basis of one shared geometrical grid: It is an ongoing experiment that wants to find out what happens if people design objects according to a shared modular grid, a common open standard that stimulates the exchange of parts, components, [...]

This Sunday altlab is holding its first Soft Circuits Open Lab at the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon (FBAUL - Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa). There is no predefined structure for the event. We will meet for the course of one day with the purposes of sharing knowledge, experimenting freely, advancing on-going projects, [...]

More interesting news from Stanford University’s research on carbon nanotubes, via a Printed Electronics World article: Ordinary textiles could be transformed into batteries that hold up to three times more energy than a mobile phone battery, by simply dipping them into nanoparticle-infused ink. Conventional batteries are made by coating metallic foil in a particle slurry and [...]

Pa++tern, created by Daito Manabe + Motoi Ishibashi, is a combination of an installation and an esoteric programming language for embroidery in which a series of industrial sewing machines are controlled by twiterers. Here’s the process: using a simple environment, users create a short program for an embroidery pattern and send it over to the [...]