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Textiles have the potential to solve many engineering problems. They allow for combining different materials into complex forms with desirable properties like softness, pliability and customizability.

Associate professor and Unstable Design Lab director,��Laura Devendorf, works at the intersection between engineering and craft to explore the possibilities textiles have to impact scientific discovery while also supporting creative practice.

This year, Devendorf has been awarded two National Science Foundation grants totalling nearly $2 million.

The first, expands upon her CAREER award research:

[$1,455,225.00]

Devendorf has developed�� software over several years as an experimental workspace, a tool that offers weavers and designers the ability to apply parametric design principles to weave drafting. In parallel, she has also focused on building an active community of users, contributors, and maintainers to ensure the project flourishes for the long-term.

Devendorf explained, “I believe that the open-source mentality that grounds the project is at the core of what stands to benefit artisans and engineers. We offer it freely online, so anyone who wants to access it can.”

“Many people who are trained in textiles are trained on proprietary software that is simply too expensive for an individual to purchase,” she continued. “AdaCAD gives these people an avenue to continue participating in research and practice.”��

This grant will support outreach activities and programs to help transition AdaCAD from an open-source project to a self-sustaining open-source ecosystem. This may include public talks, conferences, workshops, residencies, and a summer school program, as well as microgrants and the formation of an advisory board.

Ultimately, the goal is to bring together experts from disparate disciplines to solve engineering problems with textiles and advance textiles craft through more accessible technology.

“Open-source represents the same set of practices in multiple formats,” Devendorf explained. “Some that are more legible to weavers (e.g. weaving drafts represented on the user interface) and some that are more legible to engineers and computer scientists (e.g. algorithms describing common design manipulations required in weaving). This creates a space for new communities, such as creative coders, to participate in the domain of textiles.”��

Devendorf noted, “What excites me the most is being able to continue bolstering the community that is growing around the software. In some ways, the community is more powerful than the software and being able to provide resources, opportunities for connection, and spaces to share practices will be exciting in terms of what might unfold.”��

[$500,000]

Weaving offers enormous potential in engineering research—everything from biomedical devices to aerospace to wearables—for its ability to combine multiple materials into complex forms that are soft, pliable, and/or customizable. However, reproducibility at exacting quality standards is challenging because of how varied textile design and manufacturing systems are.

With this funding, Devendorf aims to solve this problem by developing tools to streamline the process of specifying functional requirements for a wider range of weaving machines. This will open the door to making weaving a viable avenue for a wider array of science and engineering domains.

The idea stems from a real-world problem. Devendorf explained, “I collaborated with a former artist in residence,��Elizabeth Meiklejohn, and�� to make an incredible electromagnetic installation that was sadly lost in the mail after an exhibition. Elizabeth wove the original design, and we wrote a paper on the process of documenting the design. Yet, when Irene and I worked together to remake it, it was never able to match the quality or her original.”

“This process raised so many interesting questions about what we can and can’t encode about one's personal practice in our design,” Devendorf continued. “I don’t think we can ever make a perfect set of instructions to replicate a design, and that’s what is beautiful about weaving. But I did see opportunities where we could impose particular constraints to the process that might provide some guarantees that someone else could make it at some level of quality. The grant will explore those ideas more deeply.”��

Ultimately, Devendorf’s research will further strengthen ties between artisan communities on one end and science and engineering researchers on the other to foster a greater exchange of technical know-how, materials knowledge and creative problem solving. Devendorf concluded, “If we had a better sense of what design modifications were commonly needed to adapt between prototype scale and industrial-scale machines, it could open pathways to products that meaningfully engage weaving.”