A Design Research Program for Textiles and Computational Technology

Textiles and computational technology share a common background in the early days of automation and industrial production. Today, we see a new opportunity for these two, by now, rather disparate areas to be joined in the search for new design spaces for everyday things. It is the ambition of this paper to outline this new design space and to sketch a design and research program for investigating it. We propose a research program motivated by the need for an aeshetics of, and design methods for, the use of new textiles and computational technology in design for everyday life. The three themes of the program all call for an integration of textile and computational materials, but from different perspectives. They aim at deepening our understanding of i) computational technology as design material, ii) textile as design material and of iii) the more general question of the interplay between spatial and temporal form elements in design