On Friday, March 7, the Textiles Lab at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, led by Associate Professor Jim McCann hosted a “Hard Textiles” lab jam. The lab jams show the unique ways textiles and technology interact, showcase the possible directions of future research and give the campus community an opportunity to see inside the lab and hear directly from the researchers.
“We decided on ‘Hard Textiles’ as a jam theme,” said McCann, “because it contradicts one of the characteristics most associated with textiles.”
During a brainstorming session on the first day of the jam, participants were joined by special guests Vernelle Noel, assistant professor in computational design at CMU; Olivia Robinson, teaching professor at IDeATe; and Harrison Apple from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry to make a list of different instances of “hard textiles” and extract unifying themes.
During the jam, the team experimented with how to use textiles to create hard objects. The two main themes were the “rigidification” of textiles and textile molds. The rigidification process involved taking soft fabric and adding a binder or coating it in a material, such as plaster, silicone, wax or electroplated copper to make a stiff panel. The textile molds approach involved filling a textile shell with another material such as expanding foam, sugar glass, silicone, or air.
“Our focus for this jam was experimenting with things that we haven’t tried combining with textiles before,” said McCann. “It was a materials exploration where we tested how to keep detail through progressive rigidification and how to program the shape of textile molds.”
The guests were joined by RI Ph.D. Yiuchi Hirose, studio technician Yue Xu and Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow Lea Albaugh. The group collaborated to create several unique hard objects, including a knitted rabbit shell hardened by expanding foam and spherical objects made out of Jolly Ranchers using a “sugar blowing” technique, similar to glass blowing. Xu and Albaugh also experimented with electroplating knitted materials to make them both rigid and conductive. A majority of the knitting was done with a Shima Seiki SWG 091N2 knitting machine.
“You can knit almost anything that you can draw and make into a PNG file,” said Xu, describing a piece made with foam-filled tubular jacquard knit. “This technique uses machine knitting to create colorful designs with ‘pockets’ of fabric. By filling those pockets with foam, we can turn the fabric into playful, three-dimensional objects.”
Attendees were encouraged to interact with the textiles, feeling the different textures, weights, and flexibilities of each experimental object. The hands-on nature of the lab jam allowed for each person to have a different sensory experience, a hallmark of the unique work done at the Textiles Lab.
“We jam for the same reason as jazz musicians would,” said Albaugh. “We do it to come up with new ideas in a collaborative, non-judgmental environment, and to have fun.”
Find video footage of the “Hard Textiles” jam on the Robotics Institute Instagram page.
For More Information: Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu