H, my name's Shanel Wu, my pronouns are they/them/theirs, and today I'll be
presenting on Unfabricate: an exploration in designing smart textiles for disassembly.
My hope is that this can inspire some people to think not only about smart
textiles but larger ways to design something for disassembly and
reusability. This clip shows a simple smart textile compo nent.
Smart textiles is an emerging field of technology that integrates electronics
into textiles, often by weaving them (as shown in this case) or
sometimes knitting and other processes into the structure. This video shows
this simple woven smart textile component, similar to a potentiometer, with
sensing and an LED output directly integrated into the fabric.
However, this future technology has this possibility of making two already big
problems even worse. So globally we generate tons of waste, and one
major waste stream is e-waste, where we discard devices and electronics.
Over 50 million tons per year is generated globally, with the USA alone generating
more than 6 million tons per year. And this waste is often shipped to different
countries, creating this whole secondary industry and pollution source.
On the other side of smart textiles, textile waste is also a large
problem. In the USA alone, we generate more than 15 million tons per year of
discarded clothing, other textiles, fabric scraps, and so on.
So if smart textiles was to become this five billion dollar industry in the next ten years
as some people project, what will smart textile waste look like?
Fortunately to help our answer, we have the wisdom of textiles to draw upon.
The smartness of smart textiles isn't just limited to electronic sensing.
In textiles, we have this history of unravelling and reusing objects for materials,
such as Depression-era knitters unraveling and reusing the yarn
from garments that their children had outgrown. We find that these
structures of knitting and weaving, because they're not glued together, are
really compatible with taking apart. Historically, these processes have
informed computing systems, and you can even say that textiles is computing.
So there's an opportunity there to really systematize this kind of disassembly.
To conduct this inquiry, we started actually by going to the thrift store
and finding things to unravel. From there, we started experimenting with
knitted and woven structures, eventually just focusing and narrowing down on weaving.
We found that to fabricate that prototype that I showed earlier,
we had to adapt existing design tools. Finally, to create a
proof-of-concept object that we could actually unravel.
As I mentioned before, we started at the thrift store! And this was to answer the
question, "What are existing practices in disassembling textiles?"
To borrow a term from design anthropology, we called this process "sensitization", to get a sense for
the past and present ways that people disassemble and reuse textiles, a lot of
clothing or materials, where people would actually go to the thrift store
and find suitable garments to unravel, so that they could use the yarn for other projects.
I think this really connects to other design-for-disassembly movements
in domains such as industrial design and architecture. Like how can we
design our things to be disassemble-able, reusable,
or more easily recyclable for materials?
A quick overview of what we learned about how to unravel a sweater:
So we start with the sweater. And we find that
if you look really closely and carefully, and learn more about the
structure of the garment, you can carefully unpick the seams so that
you're not actually cutting the sides. And you can end up actually
completely separating the garment pieces and from there we unraveled
each piece one by one. This actually shows I co-opted a little tool that
usually is just used to wind yarn, but I found it really helpful for speeding up
the unraveling process. And from there, you wind it into loops, really taking
care to not tangle it, then wash it, and then I got this nice usable yarn from a sweater.
So from here we had some lessons and
possible design principles for designing a smart textile for disassembly.
So the first one is that we wanted to minimize cutting the yarn, and a process like
serging cuts the yarn a lot. And if we shape these pieces, we'll have to cut
even less. Shape the pieces while fabricating them. And two, to support that
kind of reverse engineering that really helps a person unraveling
maximize their yield, you want to make the steps of fabrication visible.
So let's dig more into what makes a fabric unravel-able, as you saw in
that sweater that was in particular a knit, so it's made of interlocking
loops of yarn. If you see at the top of this diagram here, in knitting
(this is what serging would do) if you cut a knit piece,
you'll end up with a lot of short lengths of yarn. But then if you do keep
the yarn continuous while you're making it, you can imagine the row getting
wider or narrower, you'll be left with more continuous lengths of yarn.
However, in weaving, where you're interlocking two perpendicular sets of yarn,
It's way more common, just because that's how the machinery has
developed, to make a large rectangle and then cut a shape out of it.
We were interested in ways to modify a woven structure to make it more easy
to unravel. So in a series of experiments with a woven structure, we
were playing with ways that we could keep both the warp and the weft yarns
continuous. As I said before, the warp yarn is the vertical set, one set of
yarn (in this case it's vertical), and the weft yarn is the horizontal. And usually
inserted after the warp is set up. We started with just keeping the weft
continuous, but then we saw that we could also keep the warp continuous.
Finally, we actually ended up with this structure where we doubled up the warp
and ended in loops on each edge of the fabric, and you can see here:
if you pulled on the red end of the yarn, like a knitted structure
with those interlocking loops, these looped warp yarns could just come
straight out. To lock in the loop so that they would only unravel when we wanted
them to, we inserted a key yarn, as this arrow shows. To further make this
structure unravel-able, we adapted it for shape weaving by introducing a warp
tightening method. We'd first set up the warp normally as a
rectangle, but then because the warp is continuous, we could tighten it against
the weft to secure it against the edges of the shape.
Besides modifying the actual structure, to scale our ability to create that
structure, to make a piece large enough to be useful,
we also found it useful to modify software (which we also made in our lab)
(which you can also read that paper after you're done reading this one!)
And we found that we had to physically modify the tools we were using, these looms.
Finally, we had all the pieces necessary to create the component which you saw earlier.
These process photos show how weaving is an additive process, where you
create the design row by row. Here is a photo taken about half way through the
process of creating the circle. We chose a circle because it's
geometrically [one of] the hardest shapes to create, a smooth curve in a process
that's traditionally rectilinear. So, the photo on the right here shows (now that
the lines have something to point to) and the photo on the right
shows how the conductive yarns were easily inserted into the process as you
can see we insert them like any other yarn, along with the kind of normal
ground yarn. With that we have a smart textile component.
Now the ultimate test: is it unravel-able?
So in this piece, we see that top yarn was the "key" locking in all
the loops, and now I am unraveling that looped warp yarn you can see,
with some coaxing. You do have to kind of tug it, but it comes out
And once the looped warp is out, then all that weft there is just left for you to
roll back up. And again, keeping it from tangling,
we are left with just usable lengths of yarn. And I've actually used those little
bits of yarn to weave new things or embroider new things.
And so, we have this we have this proof-of-concept piece. Where do we go from here?
One concept that would be a good next step
is that we can adapt this structure to weave three-dimensional shapes. So if
you can imagine setting up the warp in a in the normal rectangle, and you weave a
shape with a concave area, then when you take it off the loom and you start
tightening up those warps, then you can fold it up into a three-dimensional structure.
A second opportunity that I think is unique
to knitting and weaving and yarn-based processes, is that when you unravel them,
you get this chance to kind of revisit the yarn, rewind all those processes, and
also literally while you're winding them, you have to pass them through your hands
or other tools to keep it from tangling. So you could imagine recoating
a worn-out yarn, modifying it so that it had a new color or different properties, and so on.
A third concept that I think would
be really cool is this idea of modular unraveling. So we've been talking about
just unraveling a whole piece and using it for yarn. But as you saw in the
sweater process slide, a garment is composed usually of multiple pieces and
if each piece could individually come off and be unraveled, then you can have
this modular garment where you are changing the function of a particular
component. Such as in this case, changing a scarf to the hood, or change a pressure
sensor to a moisture sensor, and so on.
One last sales pitch for designing not just to fabricate but to UNfabricate.
We are really great at making things and making machines that are even better at
making things faster than we can so I imagine we could create processes that
are also great at taking things apart so that we reduce waste and preserve more
materials to make more things. Some values that helped me think through
taking apart future smart textiles, that might be helpful for any future work
that this inspires: I found that really tuning into the history of my
materials helped the unraveling process. When I unraveled a handknit garment, I
could see the choices that knitter had made. Unraveling could help us recast
materials as objects in themselves, which can evolve and remade time
and time again. And I personally did not have a very automated process. I used my
hands, but I also saw many openings to use different tools, software and
hardware, that could save me time, suggesting future infrastructure that is
a mix of handwork, as well as different tools for time-saving, as well as
automation. This mixed infrastructure could be useful in a variety of settings
from really resource constrained environments such as emergency response
to fully industrialised settings. And finally I found this personal
exploration taking me to all of those global contexts, even though there's an
incredibly individual set of experiments. Global contexts such as e-waste recycling
workers who work overseas which handle the US's e-waste after we ship it over there.
So in summary, designing for unravelling and disassembly at large could open up
new and intriguing computational challenges. I hope that this presentation
inspires you to try out weaving and playing with conductive yarns for smart
textiles, or thinking about disassembling and recycling prototype materials.
Thanks to my advisor Laura Devendorf, my colleagues in the ATLAS Institute at the
University of Colorado Boulder, and of course, every one of my lab mates in the
Unstable Design Lab community. You can reach me via email at shanel.wu@colorado.edu
If you are social-ly media-ly inclined, Instagram is also the
best way to reach me for any sort of professional work.