Aural Textiles: Beyond Visual Pattern Making

Abstract

Co-creation describes a process of bringing customer and creator together to produce items of mutual value, allowing the design aspect of production to sit between customer and creator. A major step-change enabling such a process is the ability to link consumer design inspiration with pattern creation software linked to manufacturing equipment. One aspect of supporting such a process includes fashioning tractable methods to collect and manipulate "design inspiration" that a customer can input into and that are amenable to the application of computer-based production. Here we describe research in progress exploring the use of "data-driven designs" that challenge the existing visual bias of textile design, using the Scottish context as an example; and offer up a process by which these explorations can be transformed towards a customer-creator model: transforming bioacoustics data recorded from the soundscape into woven, knitted, printed or embroidered textiles.

Keywords:

• Bioacoustics
• co-creation
• co-design
• aural textiles
• distributed manufacturing
• data-driven design

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Highlands and Islands Enterprises under the Creative Futures Partnership to George Jaramillo.

Notes on contributors

Lynne J. Mennie

Lynne Mennie is a self-employed textile designer and weaver at Lynne’s Loom. LM is a practising handloom weaver and trained scientist. Previous work in the field of human genetic data analysis gives me a strong understanding of data gathering, sharing and interpretation. I can understand how biological data is derived and how this can subsequently be used for knitted or woven textile pattern generation; and explain this process in ways that make it tractable to non-scientists. I am interested in the process of “data-driven design” and the constraints imposed by this on the creative process; and how co-design and co-creation can change how textiles are valued by end users. [email protected]George Jaramillo is a Research Associate for The Glasgow School of Art at its Highlands and Islands Campus in Forres. As part of the Innovation School, his main focus is on challenging historic Romantic perceptions and acknowledging contemporary Hebridean ruralities. In understanding these ideas, new Highland industries and innovation can be developed to create the future heritage of the region. He completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh studying cultural geography. His work explored the regional development of the historic lead mining landscape of the southern Peak District. Prior to his academic career, he was an architectural and heritage practitioner with over eight years of experience in New York City and Yosemite National Park. [email protected]