Haptic acts of making: A surface imaging design practice using digital and virtual tools

Abstract

Inter-dimensional acts of making: a textile and surface imaging practice using digital and virtual tools.

This paper discusses new ideas and hybrid approaches to making that address complex and problematic fashion
industry modes of mass production and mass disposal. The project traces a path linking artisanal and applied
techniques to fabric surface and structure in a digitally augmented world. It asks whether digital acts of making
can contribute to a paradigmatic shift away from mass-produced artefacts to speculating and discussing ideas
around possible design futures? What are the theoretical implications of future-directed materials? These
questions are extended and explored by speculative design processes, re-imagining skin as a conceptual
material interface.

Challenged by the paradox of developing physical artefacts in order to explore alternatives to fashion industry
mass-manufacture status quo through practice-led research, the designer turned to digital tools and emergent
virtual visualisation technologies. The project foregrounds the potential of knowledge gained through integrating
new technologies and digital media with speculative acts of making and traditional textile techniques. This leads
to emergent and unexpected design that provokes and questions current fashion industry norms, disrupting the
designer’s tacit knowledge of traditional surface design techniques with material knowledge gained through
experimental modes of thinking. The methods used in this project interrogate ways that cloth and surface can be
re-imagined through the intersection of making in a digital or virtual realm.

An approach through making and methods of ‘hacking’ is employed to navigate the hybrid environment and
re-consider potential ways of entwining our digital virtual selves and future surfaces. Otto von Busch (2011)
suggests we can understand the alchemy of fashion as a technology of code, which by hacking can be changed
to intensify the technologies of the self. Through this, he suggests, fashion could be reverse engineered. The
speculative framing of this project has a synergistic relationship to developing and engaging with possible futures
through making, in a type of relationship described by Krippendorff (2005) as developing discourse as ‘surfaces
in textual matter’.

Drawing from digital imaging material and body mapping data collected from Motion Capture to construct virtual
surfaces, the research explores the possibilities of structure and surface in a physical-digital space as mutable
and no longer fixed or static. It speculates on the surface transformations possible and imaginable at the
intersection of technology and hand, and initiates dialogue about the potential of social innovations through
disrupting contemporary notions of design of our surfaces.