Introduction: Back to the Future

Abstract

At the Textile Society of America Biennial Symposium 2014 symposium, New Directions: Examining the Past, Creating the Future, I chaired a panel called “3C. Tech, Text, & Textiles.” Out of the papers and panelists present, two were invited to contribute to a special issue convened by Annin Barrett, Jeppe Emil Mogensen: Textiles and Space: The Experience of Textile Qualities in Hospital Interior Design, and Sandra Alfoldy: Cyber Comfort: Textiles as Markers of Care in Video Games. The authors have been joined by two further commissioned articles, Tincuta Heinzel: Reactive Architecture, Augmented Textiles, Domotics and Soft Architecture Fabrication: On Electronic and Reactive Textiles in Domestic Contexts, and Sarah E. Braddock Clarke: Outfitting Textiles, Fashion + Architecture: the Convergence + Interplay of Construction + Engineering for the Human Form.

Keywords:

• design
• architecture
• fashion
• computational craft
• electronic

At the Textile Society of America Biennial Symposium 2014 symposium, New Directions: Examining the Past, Creating the Future, I chaired a panel called “3C. Tech, Text, & Textiles.” Out of the papers and panelists present, two were invited to contribute to a special issue convened by Annin Barrett, Jeppe Emil Mogensen: Textiles and Space: The Experience of Textile Qualities in Hospital Interior Design, and Sandra Alfoldy: Cyber Comfort: Textiles as Markers of Care in Video Games. The authors have been joined by two further commissioned articles, Tincuta Heinzel: Reactive Architecture, Augmented Textiles, Domotics and Soft Architecture Fabrication: On Electronic and Reactive Textiles in Domestic Contexts, and Sarah E. Braddock Clarke: Outfitting Textiles, Fashion + Architecture: the Convergence + Interplay of Construction + Engineering for the Human Form.

Textile, whether applied to design, architecture, fashion, and computational craft, has been defined through history and culture in relation to technology. One of the most noticeable differences in using computers as part of textile, design, and craft compared to traditional craft is the shift of power from the hand to the eye in an act of perception—in a broad sense, to give way for the maker and the gamer to work with mental models and processes. While impoverishing the use of the hand’s dexterity to a mere pointing and on-off devices such as mouse and keyboard, the notational capabilities enabled in computing allows for structure and symbol manipulation through abstraction, thus giving a whole new dimension to the process of making. As Malcolm McCullough pointed out in Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Hand in 1998 through tacit skills and knowledge, there could indeed be a positive correspondence between digital work and traditional craft. So that, as well as the build-up of tools within tools (filters in software), not only does digital craft enable makers to navigate a continuum of possibilities through iteration and rapid prototyping, “computation makes autographic media allographic” (McCullough 1998, 102) According to Mike Press (2007, 253), “[Some craftpersons might] no longer [be] concerned with handcrafting ideas in solid forms primarily because the process would be too difficult or too time consuming.”

Parameterization is another important aspect of textile and craft abstraction. It allows for play through discovery and exploration which are essential to craft, while retaining control over the process through continuous control processes is at the heart of tool usage and craft practice. Object Oriented Programming makes parameterization possible by allowing direct symbol and structure manipulation; to define an object with a set of properties of a certain nature and allowing for those properties to change and allow for richer iteration processes and more informed decision making.

While computing is used in all sorts of craft processes, informing the practice and extending the field by applying tacit knowledge in new ways and by new means, computation can be considered as a tool, process, and medium all at the same time. According to David Crow from his 2008 web-based article, “Magix Box: Craft & the Computer”, “programming—despite its abstract nature—has the properties of a concrete craft practice.” He continues to state that “craft is so often described as a practice surrounding a specific set of materials. But in truth it is less the material that defines the practice as the process of play, experiment, adjustment, individual judgment and the love of material—any material.”

As Karen Yair (2011) states in ‘Craft & the Digital World,’ ideas around craft knowledge included the knowledge of material and processes so when Alfoldy argues in her article, Cyber Comfort: Textiles as Markers of Care in Video Games (this volume) that “video games that involve the substantive use of textiles … encourage not only improvements in motor skills that lead to increased hands-on craft talents but also performance superiority and improvement in many visual and spatial tasks,” the reader finds themselves in a playful world of online gaming communities such as Minecraft. Minecraft is all about algorithms: the day-night cycle, the steps needed to craft items, the way tools work and break. Most kids will not be thinking in terms of algorithms but they will be exposed to lots of algorithms and their game play is dependent on understanding them. Therefore, Minecraft is a core component of computational thinking. It involves topics such as logical thinking, abstraction, pattern identification, predicting, human computer interaction, hardware/software integration, algorithms, and efficiency. It is common in the Minecraft community for players to build maps for others to experience. These could be adventures, stories, or puzzles. In Alfoldy’s commentary, and watching her son Nick play Minecraft, players mine craft textiles utilizing texture packs to make personal textile surfaces and finishing touches to furniture and all kinds of interior design. From creative play to handcrafted Minecraft-inspired clothing, the interconnections between the digital and the lived lives of those engaged is well evidenced. The link between Second Life (as one of the largest online virtual world communities) and those crafters who make clothing for virtual bodies further indicate how different income is now generated in the online world through play and gaming. Alfoldy quotes Daniel Voyageur (2014) in citing that “of Second Life’s top eleven earners, two are clothing designers and one is a home décor designer.”

Interior Design also features in another video game, Animal Crossing, where scores are given to players for their fabric decisions in the “Happy Home Academy.” Whether or not happy homes feature as an element within Mogensen’s Textiles and Space: The Experience of Textile Qualities in Hospital Interior Design is debatable. What both papers may have in common is a focus on the participant. Moving from Minecraft, and the new crafting skills shared and learned to Mogensen’s observing and interviewing patients and staff in a hospital dayroom, interior textiles provide, “psychological and physical satisfactions,” Alfoldy quoting Crowley (2001, 7), this volume. It is an indictment of hospitals in cities and towns in so many metropolitan centers that traditional textiles have been removed from the interiors. When I undertook a consultancy for Malcolm Miles, Director British Health Arts Care Trust, Dundee, in 1988, I looked at how commissioned textiles could enliven hospital curtains and interior design in a low energy hospital, St Mary’s on the Isle of Wight, UK. Funding was always an issue, but it is heartening that Mogensen’s article discusses how the aesthetic qualities of textiles can not only improve patient experience of a hospital but also the ambience of its interiors for all, visitors and staff alike. It is not surprising that, in his design-based study, at the Odense University Hospital, Denmark, the results show what a difference implementing textiles in hospital day rooms, for example, can make. Home-like references, materials and textured surfaces suggest that some people felt that they could be sitting in their living room, which is not such a stretch of the imagination to a generation immersed in Minecraft, designing and playing with virtual forms. Each engagement suggests that interaction is taking place that in turn motivates visits to hospitals and pursuit of computational creativity.

Interestingly, both Mogensen and Tincuta Heinzel reference Anni Albers’ 1957 text, “The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture.” The contrast between the hard surfaces of modern architecture as exemplified by hospitals and the comfort and aesthetically enhancing qualities of textiles is well made. Heinzel moves the discussion from the public sphere to that of home and homing in domestic contexts. As she argues, “Defined as a ‘sensing home’, as a ‘communicating domestic space’, smart homes are challenging the traditional understanding of home, defined in terms of intimacy and privacy” (this volume).

There have been several research calls and papers across Europe concerned with domestic, wearable and various smart devices and how an emphasis has been placed on their social and environmental attributes. They have explored, challenged, and extended traditional understandings of home. What are the defining features of the smart home and what would it mean to live in one? To what extent is the idea of the smart home irretrievably futuristic or science-fictional? Alternatively, what are the current devices (RFID tags, GPS, online monitoring and tracking devices) that signal its development? What are the design challenges? Are smart homes desirable (and for whom)? Is the smart home and its associated devices and technologies (including developments in ubiquitous computing) already over-determined by industry imperatives and if not, what and where are the alternative visions?

Michael and Gaver (2009) have addressed some of these questions by reflecting on ‘poetical’ qualities and their relation to issues of “dwelling” in and “caring” for the environment reconceived as technoculture. Gaver et al. (2008) pursue research into “threshold devices” which entail gathering information from the home’s environs to generate new and surprising views on the domestic situation. These devices look out from the home, collecting particular forms of information from its surroundings in order to suggest novel ways in which the home is connected to and situated within its wider physical and social environment. These devices encourage exploration of the home as it is at once bounded and blurred. The aim is to access these homely engagements in their richness and complexity, which might well incorporate interpretations that span the utilitarian, the emotional and the aesthetic, suggesting new pliable planes that are membranes and interfaces between inner and outer worlds that Albers could not have foreseen.

However, and as Heinzel points out, electronic devices such as textiles have really taken off in the research field. Through Science and Technology (STS) studies and re-thinking craft as NeoCraft (referring to the title of Alfoldy’s 2008 book, NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts), electronic textiles in domestic contexts have many examples that provide a framework for reactive architecture and augmented interior furnishings. These can be viewed in the illustrations that are provided to Heinzel’s article. What can be anticipated is that of textiles transformed as domestic robots which could, of course, find themselves being bid for in Second Life or as a guest appearance in a future iteration of Minecraft.

Architecture also significantly features in Sarah E. Braddock Clarke’s Outfitting Textiles, Fashion + Architecture: the Convergence + Interplay of Construction + Engineering for the Human Form. Many readers will remember her pioneering work on textiles and technology for the Crafts Council, UK, in the 1990s as well as her co-authored many books on textiles and fashion, the last one being Digital Visions for Fashion + Textiles: Made in Code published by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2012, UK and USA. A future direction in Braddock Clarke’s article is that there will be a “convergence that includes the bespoke where new textiles and technologies enable ‘outfits’ to be made for wearing and living … tailored to suit and responsive to need” (this volume). Her suggestion that architectural façades are like new outfits chimes well with other contributing authors to this special issue in so far as there is a focus on the visual, the tactile, the material, and the technological, all impact on what is made and for whom. However, it is not just about new materials and technologies. On the one hand, architects, engineers, and fashion designers (often working in multi-disciplinary teams) combine their skills to produce new forms of viewer interaction whether in the virtual world for immersive experience or in combination with the physical spaces that can be shaped by a human, bodily presence. Whether at the high end production, for example, in the image of Driessen + van Deijne’s ‘The Beacon of Ezinge’ from 2014, a digitally printed glass on two façades of the tower in the community buildings or at the level of computational creativity that Alfoldy’s son, Nick pursues at home, I am reminded of Tanya Harrod’s prophetic comments in her 2007 essay, “Otherwise unobtainable: the applied arts and the poetics and politics of digital technology”, that a God-like author can appear “curiously anomalous” in the present cultural climate (2007, 228). Put another way, as Sadie Plant noted, “At the end of the twentieth century all notions of artistic genius, authorial authority, originality and creativity become matters of software engineering” (1997, 194). This is only one side of a much more complex story, as many of this volume’s authors point out, since collaborative working, multidisciplinary teams of researchers, artists, and designers work with computational creativity as second nature comes with a warning. We must be cautious of falling into the trap set by technocentrics and their absolute faith in technology and industry. Humans do not have control over nature.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janis Jefferies

Goldsmiths College, University of London.

[email protected]