Introduction: Textile Intersections - Textile Discipline at Cross-Roads

Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity (Nimkulrat et al. 2020) are frequently-courted concepts testifying to the high level of specialisation of scientific research and of the need to work collaboratively. These connections can be interpreted as an aspect of the interdependencies between science and technology (what is commonly known as “technosciences”) which are often realized as collaborations between different specialists and institutional structures. If “technoscientific productivity” (Klein 2005) relates to an empiric epistemic model in which there is a prevalence of “techne” (doing) over “episteme” (knowing), the “science in action” perspective advanced by Bruno Latour (Latour 1999) translates the way science is done today in both its instrumental and institutional reality, as opposed to science idealist constructions.

In an age in which the idea of expertise is challenged (Latour 2014), concepts such as interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity are to be addressed with even more consideration. Design as a science between scales (Heinzel and Hinestroza 2020) is dependent on both: the tools used in the measurement, the visualisation and the treatment of the material world, as on the (participatory) tools to understand and to represent the social phenomena. As a constructivist discipline, design has to deal not only with the analysis and the understanding of different natural phenomena, but has to take into account the possible impact of design interventions on everybody and everyday life. The high degree of specializations that exist in different scientific fields make it even more difficult to find adequate concepts that translate from one scale to another.

Textiles research has long sat alongside and across the boundaries of multiple disciplines in the broader fields of science and design. Following a first edition that took place in 2017, Textile Intersections was a three day exhibition and two day conference held at Loughborough University in London in September 2019 organised in collaboration with the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. As laid out in the call for papers, the conference aimed to question: the kinds of collaborations textiles as a medium of research has initiated; the kind of connections, cross-fertilizations, and hybridizations that are taking place; and the kind of disruptions and constructive confrontations that might occur between different disciplines related to textiles. The aim was to bring these scientific facts, methodologies and objects into the public attention to facilitate dialogue and reflection.

The conference and exhibition were arranged within four themes: textiles and architecture; textiles and interactions; textile materialities and processes; and critical textiles – balancing practice-based research and theoretical perspectives, as well as application or process orientated approaches. By doing so, the conference was looking to give visibility to a series of areas of research and scrutiny that do not have yet a proper place of dissemination in spite of fertile approaches and results. The overarching concepts were that of fibers, textiles design, and soft technological systems. Over two days, 20 papers were presented and 21 pieces were on display in the exhibition, selected from a pool of more than 80 papers and artworks proposals. The full proceedings and descriptions of the artworks shown can be found online at https://www.textile-intersections.com/.

The conference was opened by a keynote delivered by Juan P. Hinestroza, an Associate Professor of Fiber Science at Cornell University (USA) where he directs The Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory (The Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory, 2021). In his talk, he discussed several strategies his laboratory has pioneered to modify the properties of cotton. Cotton fibers that conduct electricity, sense and trap toxic gases, kill bacteria, change colours and store complex information have been made possible by judiciously controlling the interactions of metal organic framework molecules (MOFs) on the surface of natural fibers. The presented examples demonstrate how an “old” natural fiber such as cotton can be re-designed as an engineered material with unique functionalities while preserving its properties.

Ellen Harlizius-Klück gave the closing keynote of the conference presenting how the modern interpretations of weaving as a precursor to the digital computer have much older ties to digital interfaces and the mathematics that underpin them. She also discussed how the European Research Council Project PENELOPE (Project PENELOPE, 2021), of which she is the Principal Investigator, uses material interfaces to explore and demonstrate the relationship between coding and weaving.

When the conference concluded we asked a selection of the presenters across each of the conference themes if they could expand on their work. This resulting special issue contains five articles that build on the conference themes each discussed in more detail below.

Textiles and Architecture

Architectural design contains within it an extended history of textiles as architectural materials including research on historic textile enclosures (Semper 2004) and continuing with the extensive use of textiles in interior design (Albers 1957), the asymmetric parallel between fashion and architecture (Wigley 1993; Quinn 2003) or the comparison between textiles and construction (Albers 1965; Palz 2012). The new developments taking place in the field of textiles are pushing the boundaries of architecture and building construction (Popescu et al. 2018). Two of the articles presented here are looking into the use of architectural waste and into growing architecture as new forms of dealing with the built environment.

The textilisation of rubble as an embodied reflection on the site- specific architectural memory of Les Petites Affiches by Anna Saint-Pierre, Aurélie Mossé and Jean-François Bassereau explores the role of textiles not merely as a decorative or structural architectural element, but as vessels for memories of spaces that no longer exist. Based on a textile design approach, the article explores the idea of textilisation as a means of developing new modes of transmission of a building's memory not through an identical restoration, but by transformation. Transforming stone rubble into materials such as inks to be screen printed on textiles allows for questioning how architecture might be preserved and reimagined through material processing.

In her article, Designing and Living with Organisms – Weaving entangled worlds as doing multispecies philosophy, Svenja Keune introduces the idea of multispecies cohabitation in textiles design, an approach in which the living organisms play a role. She challenges the anthropocentrism inherent in textile design methodologies and proposes a design perspective as a lived experience in and within the natural world. Based on an autobiographical account related to her project Textile Farming, the author shows the difference between a “solution-driven practice” in textiles bio-design and a “design practice as a way of being-with” the bio-organisms, bringing in this way together current methodologies of biodesign.

Textile Materialities and Processes

The Industrial Revolution was largely underpinned by the textile industry. The invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733, the Spinning Jenny machine by James Hargreaves in 1764, and Cartwright’s Power Loom in 1785 established scaling up the production of fibers and fabrics and implicitly for the imposition of the industrial model. This model was conditioned by the standardisation of technical devices and a systemic perspective that prioritized rationalization of resources, sometimes neglecting the social and the environmental concerns.

Today the textile industry is the result of these transformations, as it is the result of a series of developments in the field of chemistry which allowed the creation of new synthetic materials and dyes (Bensaude-Vincent 2008). More recently the integration of electronics into textiles structures has facilitated their transformation into soft computers (Berzowska 2005). But the promises of textiles' high functionalities come with a series of constraints: from the kind of applications they could serve, to the limitations related to scaling up production (Heinzel et al. 2018), as well as their critical ecologies (Manzini 1989). For example, while light has been incorporated into interactive textiles since some of the earliest research (Buechley and Eisenberg 2009), no single method for doing so has become dominant, particularly for manufacturing at scale. As was presented at the Textile Intersections conference, both woven fibre optics (Robertson et al. 2019) and yarn-embedded electronics (Hardy et al. 2019) have been demonstrated to be feasible, there are remaining periphery challenges such as connections to supporting circuitry in a manner that is complementary to the textile application (Robertson et al. 2019) and examining the end-of-life processing and sustainability of electronic textile products (Hardy et al. 2019).

In Embroidered Inflatables: Exploring Sample Making in Research Through Design, Bruna Goveia da Rocha, Oscar Tomico, Daniel Tetteroo, Kristina Andersen and Panos Markopoulos further the development of active haptic technologies within textiles. In particular they examine the contributions of sample-making to Research through Design through a case study of developing inflatables for wearable applications. The originality of the paper consists in advancing a model of technical investigation that augments the original technical context and adds a set of strategies to facilitate the revisiting of the samples from a designers’ perspective.

Textiles and Interaction

The integration of electronics into textile structures enables the functionalization of textiles into sensing and actuating systems. As technologies such as light (Rathnayake and Dias 2015), sound (Stewart 2019), and haptics (Heinzel 2014) are miniaturized and implemented in flexible formats, questions are raised around how reactive and interactive textiles can and should be formed. Furthermore, as textiles have become functionalized and part of interactive digital systems, their relationship with user’s interactivity needs to be examined. Interactive textiles have uses within healthcare and wellbeing (Leong et al. 2016) through to computer interfaces (Karrer et al. 2011) to artistic performances (Skach et al. 2018). Textiles lend themselves to the “material turn” (Robles and Wiberg 2010) of human-computer interaction, as they allow for the direct manipulation of tactile material and remove the reliance on metaphor within designed interactions. Further, as textiles are the base material of fashion and clothing, interactive textiles open up new modes of expression in wearable technology, moving away from gadgetry and towards flexible interfaces (Berzowska 2005).

Caroline McMillan’s text From Scent Projection to Respiratory Protection: Designing Digital Olfactory Interactions for Fashion Wearables, takes AURA, an Internet of Things case study, to exemplify olfactory wearables that render sensor-captured data into digital scent display. By adopting an understanding of the body as the venue of data extraction, the author aims to advance strategies for subversive reworking of olfactory interfaces for wearables. Through several participatory design iterations, the project aimed to outline the possible data-empowerment solutions based on the emotional-based olfactory sense, opening the inquiry toward senses that are not usually present in textiles design.

Critical Textiles

Here we used the term critical textiles as a way to reflect on textiles from the prism of philosophy (Bensaude-Vincent 2011), of phenomenology (Félix-Fromentin 2016; Van Dongen 2019) of material culture (Ingold 2015) and/or feminist theory (Michelman and Kaiser 2000). A special focus has been given to the way in which critical craft and critical practices shape new discourses for textile, as well as how textiles can contribute to/intersect new materialisms and ecological thinking debates. For the conference, topics related to corporeality, the body and subjecthood as defined by the practice and the use of textiles were present in several of the selected articles.

This was the case of Teresa Almeida’s paper “(e)Textiles New Materialities” in which she explores the intersections within bodily materialism and future textiles. The article presents a series of e-textiles design research artefacts as support for exploring the materiality of care in everyday life. The research toolkit she developed has been used to facilitate the understanding of embodied practices and materiality of care in designing for chronic stress while challenging the traditional approaches to health and care and the design of future textiles. Teresa Almeida’s paper is a good example of a design strategy for experiential knowledge involving different stakeholders and dealing with intimate concerns.

Closing

Almost two years have passed since the Textile Intersections conference was held in 2019. Unfortunately, the global pandemic that started only months after the conference caused difficulties and delays to the production of this special issue. We express our sincere appreciation to those that were still able to contribute and those that were able to provide peer review under such difficult circumstances. We would also like to thank the chairs of the conference, the curators of the exhibitions and the editors of the journal for their understanding and constant support.

We continue to be impressed by the ingenuity and further perspectives brought by the textiles research community. The articles published here provide an excellent example of the breadth of contributions within the field and bring a sense of excitement to further work to come. We look forward to continuing to share with each other our new research findings once again in person.

Tincuţa Heinzel [email protected]

Rebecca Stewart [email protected]

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tincuta Heinzel

Tincuţa Heinzel is an artist, designer and researcher with a background in visual arts, design and cultural anthropology. Her artistic production makes use of electronic textiles, digital and interactive media and engages the ways in which techniques can be diverted in order to bring into the light their potentialities. Her research focuses on the impact of material turn in design and the new forms of industry. She initiated, curated, and / or coordinated several projects, such as “Artists in Industry” (Bucharest, 2011–2013), “Haptosonics” (Oslo, 2013) and “Attempts, Failures, Trials and Errors” (Bergen - Bucharest, 2017-1018). She is presently a Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University (UK). Additional information can be found at: www.textiltronics.com.

Rebecca Stewart

Rebecca Stewart is a Lecturer in the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London and was previously a Lecturer with the Centre for Digital Music and Centre for Intelligent Sensing in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. Her research is in wearable technology with a focus on binaural audio and textile interfaces. She is also investigating methods for enabling research innovations to be more accessible to applications designers. Additional information can be found at: theleadingzero.com.