CONCEPT:
SymbiosisS is an electronic textile designed for public places where people need to wait for long time – such as hospitals or administration offices. The artifact visualizes minutes one spends while waiting; by taking a seat, an animation of pattern-patches start to appear on the three-dimensional carpet-like material. Further development focuses on an interactive learning environment for rehabilitation.
I am working on this project with Kart Ojavee since January 2010. So far we have built two prototypes: SymbiosisW and SymbiosisS; our goal is to bring the project to the next step: from a prototype to a product. This means during the class I am looking for a fabrication technique for a stable, safe, durable, easily manufacturable product and for a replicative process.
ELECTRONICS
One of the biggest challenges was to find the right heating element. For SymbiosisW we used conductive thread in a resistance of 4-600Ohms per meter, we powered it with 12Volts. The thermo-chromatic ink (27C) disappeared in about 6 seconds. For SymsbiosiS I, we decided to use 24 Volts (we made some changes on the hardware and wanted to reach a quicker color change) but the threads just kept breaking from overheating. This time we also noticed that the resistance of the threads highly varied; the same length of thread could have a resistance between 300-1200 Ohms- which becomes a problematic issue at heating. (An explanation could be that the thread forms small loops and therefore the resistance converges to infinite).
During the class I was looking for other solutions. First, I tried to print conductive ink over the material. The conductive copper ink I used was easy to apply on the surface, and it had a reasonably low resistance so it is good for connections (therefore it was not good for heating). I could have looked for inks in higher resistance, but I realized after several days that my painted surface actually cracked and would not conduct anymore. Do not use conductive ink on material if you plan to bend the textile and
SCREEN-PRINTING
Laser-cutting the pattern. The laser-cutter has a limited size of working area; I decided to build up the sheet from small modules:
Generating patterns, Voronoi tessalation.
Hard to describe with only few words how the Voronoi tessalation works. From our point of view, the beauty comes when we take a look on the result: the special arrangement of cells intuitively suggests to fold the material into a 3D landscape. Numerous -prewritten- algorithms exist to create the base of the arrangement, and thanks to the active open-source society, we could easily create an application to generate these cells by defining points, and therefore the shape of the cells one by one.
Once we reached the desired pattern, we could export it to a vector graphic format which was processable by Illustrator furthermore by the lasercutter.
