Soft Sketch

I’ve been designing clothing for 10 years and for about 9 of them I have been obsessed with putting the creation of one’s garment into the wearer’s hands. This project is a demonstration of that interest as a dynamic textile. With fiber optic fabric and wearable LCD screens on the verge of breaking into the market, I decided to take a crack at a completely soft display screen. This also was my first project where I fully explored the challenge of designing a soft circuit.

My concept was to come up with a textile that was able to receive an image from an html form sent over the internet. Once received, the image would seemingly bloom into existence over the surface of the textile.

It was important to me that the output was not a luminous one, I wanted the change to happen within the nature of the material, or rather the fibers themselves. This led me to use thermochromic ink, which is an ink that turns from color to colorless with applied heat. Making a display screen, I needed to figure out what resolution to make it. I would need to treat each pixel as it’s own entity, I would need to handcraft each pixel by putting multiple layers of electrical components together using the softest materials that could be found. Once it was figured out how to make one, I would need to replicate the process how ever many times my resolution called for.

With this in mind, I decided a small grid of 6 x 6 would be a good starting point.

Knowing what kind of output I wanted to achieve, I could gather my materials and appropriate hardware.

Here is a comprehensive list of what I used in the end.

Soft screen:

sheeps wool

nichrome – get it

conductive thread – get it here or here

conductive fabric – get it

copper foil

thermal adhesive get it

36 NPN 2N2222 transistors – found at any radioshack

Hardware:

Arduino Diecimila

WIZnet module

ethernet shield

Power:

3.7 v lithium ion battery

Software:

the software was a simple html form of check boxes and php script to store and recall data from a MySQL database. I then wrote an arduino program that pulled the data from the server and switched on the pixels i had created in correspondence to the checkboxes that were submitted.

Not only was this project meant to be an exploration of a dynamic electronic textile, but was also meant to create a bridge between two people that were remote of each other, but wanted to collaborate creatively.

NEXT CHAPTER – Materials Test