Molly Price Lunchtime Talk Write-up

Last Friday, Molly Price, who recently joined the Studio, gave a lunchtime talk about the potential of smart fabrics, her past work with Jason Bruges Studio and her current work as UK based associate with Diffus Design, a Copenhagen based design company, who combine traditional craft techniques with new technologies.

Molly has a background in architecture and therefore has an interest in the potential of how wearable tech and smart fabrics can relate to physical spaces. She told us that she feels, because of the ubiquitous nature of textiles (our homes are full of them) there is huge potential for embedding them with functionality to augment and connect us to our surroundings.

Molly began the talk by telling us about some of the projects she worked on as a project designer at Jason Bruges Studio. Mimosa was an interactive artwork using Philips Lumiblade OLEDs. The OLED panels were arranged as a flat surface, which responds to the heat of peoples’ palms as they move over them, closing mechanically like flowers to mimic responsive plant systems. Back to Front, on site this year will be a series of six, 3m tall granite structures embedded with LEDs that have been designed for a public park in Toronto. The structures will respond the changing levels of light within the park in real time, revealing animated silhouettes of people walking past. The 21st Century Light Space Modulator transformed a dark, under-loved site on London’s Southbank into an animated, dynamic space with lights and reflective dichroic and aluminium structures, which danced on a motorised pulley system in response to passers-by.

As well as these spatial artworks, Molly has been involved in projects developing smart wearables, from heated gillets to jackets with integrated ECG (electrocardiogram) health sensors and controls at the Wearable Futures Design Group. She is particularly interested in the potential of smart fabrics in functional clothing, and the softness and comfort that smart fabrics could bring to medical devices within the home.

Developments in smart fabrics are influencing a huge range of different disciplines, spanning architecture, fashion and interactive art. Molly drew our attention to some exciting new developments, which are beginning to pervade these fields. She told us about Tactility Factory’s TF skins, which embed textile into concrete, TITV’s LED sequins, colour changing, thermo chromatic materials as seen in SymbiosisO: Voxel, and embedded shape memory alloys. She also told us about electro luminescence in fabrics, woven and printed sensors, fabric speakers and fabrics that harvest energy, to name but a few!

Diffus Design are excited by the concept of combining these smart functionalities. They have developed Wall-E motion, a modular system of fabric disks, making up a reconfigurable blind, which are embroidered with conductive thread and have different sensory outputs, emitting light, sound and potentially scent. They have also developed Hollow Lamp, which instead of having a central bulb, has fibre optic and LED lights emitting light from the fabric of the lamp itself.

Molly is currently working with Diffus and a consortium of partners on CREATIF, an EU Seventh Framework Programme in partnership with the University of Southhampton, Zaha Hadid architects and Base Structures among others. The project is centred around creating collaborative tools for designing smart textiles. They will be developing intuitive design software with which you will be able to drag and drop functionality into your own design, which will then be printed using electronic inks/pastes onto textiles, using bespoke dispenser printer technology.