CREW: Oh, cool.
YOEL FINK: It's exciting to really change
the aesthetics of technology.
If you think about it, people today
have to sort of almost choose between aesthetics and beauty
and technology.
Those are orthogonal directions.
What's happening now is these two worlds are coming together.
And this class is preparing students
to be able to combine the world of aesthetics, specifically
expressive fabric, construction and design,
and the world of devices and computation.
MARYAM ALJOMAIRI: Most of the powerful ideas
and most of the powerful projects and research
really comes in these in-between spaces
and these in-between domains, and this is exactly what
this class is doing.
Textiles are something that we interact
with every day in terms of interiors,
or furniture, or even clothing.
I think there's a lot of potential
in utilizing textiles across scales,
and how can we start to make these textile smarter
and responsive at a fiber level?
ELLIOT YARWOOD: Fabrics almost mimic materials in a way
where you have various different length scales that all come
together to create your overall structure
and your final product.
The biggest thing with textiles is
that, a lot of the times, all the different fibers
in your clothes are just made up of a single fiber.
Maybe there's like polyester and cotton mixed together,
but at the smallest scale, just that individual strand
of fiber, it's just one material.
I think that's what this class is
sort of bringing to the forefront of our attention
is that, even just by adding a few materials,
you can really exponentially increase the complexity of what
you're able to achieve with that material
and how you're able to eventually use it.
YOEL FINK: The meaning of fabrics
is changing now for the first time in history.
The fabric is going to be a computer.
The fabrics are going to do for us
everything that our smartphones are doing and a lot more.
And the reason they could do a lot more
is because they really cover the surface of our body.
And if you want to really understand your health better
and get early warnings of changes in your health,
we've just published some work on fabrics
that could help listen, to help hear
for people that have impairments in hearing, fabrics that
could listen to the unborn.
And so what we're doing is converting the fabric
from just being what it has always
been to something that plays a very
meaningful role in our lives.
JULIETTE MARLON: So we've been making fibers for many years.
And inside of them, we add their functionality.
So this fiber, for example, it is a battery
so you can connect it to a device and power a device
with it.
And now the challenge is, how do we really
integrate them into fabrics.
And we can draw elastomer materials
so this fiber can really stretch.
But once you add other materials into it,
materials that are typically too rigid, like a metal electrode,
for example.
Metal doesn't stretch, so I can't pull this fiber
or I'm just going to break the electrode inside.
So we developed a process that allows
you to, after you draw your fiber,
make your electrode wavy, give it
buckled shape so that you can then pull on your fiber
and the fiber will be stretchable.
YOEL FINK: You know, this class is an MIT class
but in fact, it is the child of a very deep collaboration
between myself and MIT and the Rhode Island school of design.
We don't have any real courses or a lot of knowledge
at MIT at this point on fabrics.
And the collaboration with Rhode Island school of design
help us learn about fabrics and themselves
learn about computation and programming.
MARYAM ALJOMAIRI: The RISD students
have been an incredible resource, including Elizabeth,
who's the TA of the class.
They bring in a lot of knowledge related
to knitting and textiles, and how
to operate as well the knitting machine.
ELLIOT YARWOOD: I didn't even think about the fact
that there are people that are majoring in textiles.
And I think it's really fascinating to see just
how skilled everyone is.
Something that seems like impossible, just knitting
a very simple sample is just incredibly easy to them.
It's really fun to be able to work with them
and sort of play to everyone's strengths
to create like a really interesting product.
Back 5 seconds.
Now, let's say--
YOEL FINK: The concept of computing fabrics
is envisioning a very different future.
Yes, fabrics are still going to be the closest
things to our heart.
They're still going to be as soft and as beautiful
as they have always been.
But now they're going to take on a whole new meaning.
They're going to be providing value
to us that has never before been seen.