Digital Lace

V&A Museum of Design Dundee will begin 2015 with their first touring exhibition visiting more than 70 places the length and breadth of Scotland. The tour takes in rural locations such as Harris, Campbeltown, Elgin and Galashiels alongside Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen. Part of the new museum's national pre-opening programme, the 'Design in Motion' exhibition will be housed in the Travelling Gallery, a custom-built, mobile, contemporary gallery inside a bus. It features designers Geoffrey Mann, Sophia George, Anarkik3D, Sara Robertson and Sarah Taylor, Lynne MacLachlan, the Digital Design Studio and fashion designer Holly Fulton. This textile and accompanying samples build on the previous Digital Lace (Table Runner) and showcase new colour-change dynamics. Digital Lace combines traditional (black Holland Linen) with cutting edge materials using (newly developed) white-scattering liquid crystal thermochromic dye and polymer optical fibres. The responsive materials are activated through the use of specially designed light-emitting diodes (LEDs) devices and heat control mechanisms and uses micro-controllers to sequence and activate light and colour-change in the following ways: using liquid crystal thermochromic dyes which change from opaque (white) to transparent (or coloured) on temperature change; using optical fibre to create light loss along the fibre length; and, using colour and lighting control to trigger a collision of light, colour and tonal effects within the material to create novel light and shadow interplay. Digital Lace takes inspiration from rare, seventeenth century lace samplers held at the National Museums' Collection, Scotland. The qualities observed in the samplers have been instrumental in prompting new materiality concepts and design ideas for this work