Digital lace:a collision of responsive technologies

There is still limited insight into the creative potential of these materials that are fundamental to the exploitation of ‘smart’ material properties, the development of new ‘responsive’ surfaces and digital tools that facilitate designing with colour-change and light-emitting properties specific to textiles. The submission to the Fiber arts category presented new material concepts as Digital Lace: a novel, multifaceted textile, which was presented as a responsive table runner for a digitally manufactured console table. Digital Lace explicitly pooled together the digital-craft skills base and disparate expertise of printed textile practitioner and thermochromic specialist, Robertson and constructed textile practitioner and light-emitting optical fibre specialist, Taylor. Within the context of ‘smart’, material development and experimentation, Digital lace exploits and amalgamates the responsive technologies of dye and fibre with digital-control