Digital Dynamics: An Interactive Design Process for Generating Knitted Textiles

摘要

This practice-led research project investigates new generative ways of designing with interactivetextiles, embracing their inherent active and temporal properties to develop alternative methodsand open up new aesthetic possibilities. In this project interactive textiles are recognised asconstructed material artefacts and their expressive, performative behaviours are used to informnew ways of making. The investigation opens up a new design space for textiles through adeeper understanding and utilisation of interactive textiles and their behaviours through newforms of digital making with materials.Due to their temporality, these materials are regarded as collaborating agents. This allows fora design process of interaction and collaboration with active materials and self-assemblingmatter. By refracting and disrupting conventional linear textile and knit design processes newmethods for transforming interactive knit structures emerge. Interactive textiles are exploredthrough an evolving, generative textile design practice. In the context of matter and technologyas materials for design, a generative process that allows for a decoding of digital informationto generate new forms is adopted. Through this process textiles simultaneously become bothtools and materials to design with; the function of the textile - in its digital or physical state - isto inform the making of new interactive textiles.The significance of this research lies in its methodological contribution to contemporary textiledesign practice through the formulation of new generative textile design methods. The researchand practice embrace digital and physical materials; recognising the particular procedural andaesthetic qualities of these new media.