Fabric Technology

Future cloth

As the boundaries between craft and technology blur, designers are looking at new ways of interpreting textiles through the physical and virtual cloth, and how they interact with the user.

While the two seem world's apart, textiles and technology are actually very similar in the way they use codes to translate information. Historically, it was the jacquard loom that inspired the first computer, with its method of using punched cards to weave patterns. Computer codes of zeros and ones can be compared to knitting patterns of knit and purl, while the stitch is textiles' answer to the pixel, as a way of building up an image from the micro to the macro scale.

Yet while cloth is tangible and tactile, technology is predominantly invisible and elusive, and it is this exciting combination that is being explored by designers - trying to capture and represent physical and virtual information.

Explored at a recent conference at the ICA London, called Candy + Code, there is a great deal of research and work being carried out within this area, particularly through collaborations between textile designers, artists, scientists and computer programmers.

One of the speakers, Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, began her thought process into this area using sweets to represent binary codes, as in Lollipop Grid. She is currently exploring a similar theme through innovative experimentation with knitting and computers - successfully merging craft and technology.

Computers and textiles are becoming more intertwined than ever. With the emergence of such technologies as Virtual Knitting (on the Wii) and inputting knitting patterns into computers with hand movements, professionals and consumers alike are given the chance to invent and play around with their own textiles and knitting patterns in ways that may give rise to new textile technology someday in the future.

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