openMaterials

oM loves Hannah Perner-Wilson’s (Plusea) tutorials and projects involving wearable technology and textile electronics. Above is one of her tutorials to make a bend sensor from textile duct tape, three layers of Velostat, conductive thread and fabric. It uses an Arduino and Processing to graph the sensor data. And one of her work-in-progress projects, a [...]

There is a really interesting lab at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture. The Centre for Architecural structures and Technology, C.A.S.T. Not only is it an acronym but also the main part of their research, forming and casting of reinforced concrete using fabric forms.

I’ve just found a great online lecture with Leah Buechley in conjunction with the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS547). The lecture runs at just over an hour. Computational textile researchers weave, solder and sew electronics into cloth to build soft, flexible and wearable computers. Computational textiles or “e-textiles” is a young [...]

Using conventional screen printing techniques Dai Nippon Printing in Japan have developed a way of using light emitting inks that can be printed on a range of different surfaces, including paper and fabric. The ink works with a lumniescent get which emits bright light when a voltage is applied to it. The technique generates pixels [...]

InnTex is doing some pretty interesting work on interactive textiles. First they developed a matrix pressure activated fabric: it uses knitted fabric for textile structure, tin copper or stainless steel/polyester for augmentation, and is made out of an inner non-conductive layer and two outer conductive layers, allowing for the circuit to close when the outer [...]

Philip Ball in an interview with Jennifer Leonard (for the book Massive Change): “It’s about moving away from the classical idea of materials – inert stuff that serves a structural role – toward the more contemporary notion of materials. More and more, materials are active and respond to stimuli in their environment. Materials can light [...]