Phd in Tectonic Textiles

Energy-harvesting and self-actuated materials for the home

Aurélie Mossé - PhD fellow with CITA & TFRG

Biography

Aurélie Mossé is a textile designer & researcher, currently undertaking a Phd in Tectonic Textiles, research funded by the Danish Government and conducted within CITA, Centre for IT and Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen, in collaboration with the Textiles Futures Research Group, Central Saint Martins, College of Art and Design, London. Exploring the boundaries between textiles and architecture, her Phd project is investigating the potential of energy-harvesting & self-actuated textiles to be implemented in a domestic context.

Design speaking, she is passionate about questioning the boundaries of textiles and how they can redefine our relationship with the home. Especially navigating between textile, furniture and architecture islands, most of her works explore the poetic and emotional potential of textiles to prevent the dematerialisation and dehumanisation of our everyday environment.

As a graduate of MA Textile Futures at Central Saint Martins, she challenged the use of laser-cutting techniques with a collection of furniture for domestic experiences, based on emotionally durable concepts. In the mid-time, she developed experience within the art & design arena, notably working with Philips Design, Peclers Paris as well as Christelle Le Déan and Pablo Reinoso’s studios. She is also a founding member of Puff & Flock, a textile designers’ collective, regularly posting food for thoughts on their website.

Research Area

Energy-harvesting & Self-actuated textiles for the Home

smart textiles, responsive design, energy-harvesting & self-actuated materials, architecture, textile design, resilient thinking

Research Context

Within the last decade, textiles became true performers of change. ‘Stronger’, ‘faster’, ‘lighter’, ‘safer’ and ‘smarter’, as many qualities that Mathilda Mc Quaid contributed to reveal through the ‘Extreme Textiles’ exhibition (Mc Quaid, 2005). One of the key innovations in that field has been the emergence of smart textiles. They constitute a specific type of high-performance fabrics – ‘specifically engineered to accomplish a particular performance objective’- because of their capacity to respond dynamically to the environment (Addington, 2005, p159). As any other ‘smart materials’, smart textiles are characterized by their ability to respond to stimulus from the environment by a specific change of behaviour as for instance a colour or shape change. The very specific shape of these materials – that share similar properties with textiles such as the fact to be woven or flexible- make them a distinguishable category within the variety of intelligent material products. The particularly new dimension of these textiles is that they encourage the invisible integration of sensors and actuators into our environment, are extending the limits of where computation can operate, and enabling materials to interact with their surroundings.

New materials and technologies have always suggested new ways of building by pushing the boundaries of what is possible but this is particularly true for textiles today as they emerge as the new drivers of an architectural revolution (Beesley & Hanna, 2005). Beyond smart textiles, architects show a general revival of attention for textiles. While they have always been used in tensile structure and within the interiors, textiles concepts such as pleating, weaving, knotting are increasingly used to inform architectural and building practices. These concepts, alongside with the development of high-performance fabrics – that allow textiles to operate at a building scale-, induce new approaches to construction processes.

By extending textiles’ competencies and territories of operation, these technological innovations are radically transforming the nature of the textile discipline, opening new horizons for textiles to take a leading role in redefining our environments. But today, the world of design is also confronted with the necessity to face the consequences of this ability to engineer the world. In light of what we know about climate change, the rampant consumption and waste of natural resources, the disappearance of ecosystems, these consequences are no longer anecdotal. We have to rethink our design culture in term of sustainable futures.

Research question, Aims & Objectives

Within this debate, the present research is asking, how energy-harvesting and self-actuated textiles can encourage the design of a more sustainable home? This research is a practice-based project to create innovative responsive textile membranes for the home.

The purpose of the project is to map out new design territories for smart textiles by exploring the potential of energy-harvesting and self-actuated textiles within a domestic context. By questioning how smart textiles can lead to a new understanding of the domestic space and by exploring how they can contribute to the making of sustainable responsive environments, this research hopes to highlight there is a space for smart textiles to become the actors and actuators of a more permeable, sensitive and resilient home.

Supervision

• Dr Mette Ramsgard Thomsen, CITA
• Carole Collet, TFRG

Recent events include

• 2010, Sustainable by Design Seminar, Speaker, Ecobuild, London,UK
• 2009, Future Textile Conference, Speaker, Centre for Textile Research, Copenhagen, DK
• 2009, Ice-fern, Awarded in the Aesthetics category, Gecko Think Forward Competition by Création Bauman, Langenthal, CH
• 2009, Puff & Flock with DB, exhibition, Salone del Mobile, Milan, IT
• 2009, Puff & Flock, exhibition & seminar with DB, Interiors Design Show, Birmingham, UK
• 2008, Creation of Extraordinary Wallpapers for Zanotta Shop, Milan, IT
• 2008, [Extra]ordinary furniture, MA Textile Futures Degree Show, London, UK
• 2008, Talk, Interactive Spaces, Interactive & Adaptive Furniture workshop, Aarhus, DK
• 2007, Constellation Wallpaper, 1rst Prize partnership MA Textiles Futures & Philips Design, London, UK

Contact

Please feel free to contact me for any question or suggestion:

• Aurelie.Mosse@karch.dk

Links

• http://www.aureliemosse.com
• http://cita.karch.dk
• http://tfrg.org.uk

Phd Blog

Follow 3 amazing Phd in Textiles Futures, including mine at:

• http://textilefuturesphd.blogspot.com/

-- AurelieMosse - 19 Nov 2008