Our senses are stimulated less and less. The interactions we entertain with everyday devices are lacking sensibility, tactility, sensory experiences. Daily Haptics has emerged as a response to this insight, creating new tactile experiences in order to reconnect us with everyday routines. These objects aim to emcompass unexpected materiality, in turn to make you question sensory ability. Visual information alone is not enough, you need to TOUCH.

The project aims to make air tangible through textiles, to enhance our notion of space, while questioning our perception of material. The Air Momentum implies the concept of transience in the design outcomes and draws upon three research areas: air as a material, as a tool and as a design process.

How can traditional textile craft soften the digital aesthetic of 3D printed textiles ?

New advances in 3D printing technology allow for the design of complex geometry and structures that would be impossible to produce with traditional manufacturing processes. Such technology promotes a rather homogeneous digital aesthetic. This is especially true for 3D printed textiles, often developed with an engineering approach rather than textile design perspective.

The aim of this project is to explore the yet undefined space where traditional textiles and additive technologies are combined; using traditional craft techniques. This introduces a new visual language that challenges and softens the digital aesthetic associated with 3D printed surfaces.

Combining labour-intensive needlecraft and textile manipulation techniques with 3-D printed elements, Digicrafted looks into new design possibilities for hybrid design connecting the digital and the handmade.

Material Alchemy presents the most innovative, thought-provoking design approaches to materials within the 21st century. Enlisting the help of luminaries from the world of science, technology, and design to showcase new responses to material innovation and providing key insights into how materials will be utilised to shape our future environments. Exploring key topics: such as synthetic biology, how designers and scientists are designing with living matter, utilising the laboratory as a means to cultivate and grow new materials, to technological innovations, new technologies, such as how 3D printing is revolutionising the manufacturing industry. Please click on the link to see a preview of the publication.

In collaboration with Unique Style Platform & imactivate

Vaettir: The Dignity of Plants

Vættir is a poetic project that comprises of a collection of products that have been designed specifically for plants, highlighting their personalities and needs. Inspired by the Swiss Declaration of Plant Rights, which affords plants rights as living entities; the project is intended to be a playful look at the curious nature of our relationship with flora and fauna. Each piece in the collection is designed with a specific plant, or type of plant, in mind, looking at creating the perfect vessel and tools that reflect their characteristics. The resulting pieces are a handcrafted collection that seeks to engage people with plants in more meaningful ways.

In collaboration with Amy Congdon

Immateriality: The Future Human

What role will textile design play in the creation of biological products of the future?

Biological Atelier is a critical design project exploring a possible future for the fashion atelier, visualising a future in which designers utilise developments in the fields of biotechnology to create materials that are grown, not made.  The project looks at the blurring roles of the designer, the craftsman and the scientist.  With one of the most controversial sets of materials becoming available for manipulation i.e. our body, and those of other species, it could be argued that the fashion of the future could be grown from the ultimate commodity.

Anyone for an ethically grown ivory bracelet or a cross species fur jacket?

How can the textile discipline critically engage the public with emerging biotechnologies and the life sciences?

Design Fictions is a critical design project made up of a collection of carefully considered and crafted design fictions. These provide a strong narrative to provoke debate and dialogue into the life science industry and the appropriation of life, whilst also making us reconsider the role of the designer whose manufacturing process is likely to take place in a laboratory in 2075. Based on research driven future scenarios that depict converging threads around a vision of potential biofutures, the purpose of the work is to raise critical questions over our current understanding of the potential cultural and environmental implications of synthetic biology and stem cell technology.

Voluntary Mutations explores the aesthetic possibilities of a subculture derived from an environment where D.I.Y stem cell biology becomes as ubiquitous as computing, while Parasitic Prosthesis suggests that the posthuman body is genetically synthesized with home-cultured parasitic organisms, so that it may quickly adapt to the challenges of a new environmental paradigm. Biocollectibles provokes debate into the quietly ominous market for genetic products that has the potential to render our bodies as future farms, and is illustrated by a very precious, very valuable Genetic First Aid Cabinet.

Proposing the concept of a future human paradigm, this project explores the way in which textile design could help us experience the otherwise intangible expressions of our unconscious mind. Exploring poetic prostheses to encourage an engagement with the unseen and nourish understanding.

Photograpy by Robert Klebenow

Hair & Makeup by Claudia Rotoli

Model Nadja Kratschmer