The Beat-le is a circular fashion option that allows users to create customizable designs with the option of washing out said designs so the object can continue to be used in different ways. Conceptually I thought of this project as a sustainable substitute for the circuit. My code allows users to upload an .bmp image and then a turtle slices the image to create a tool path that then applies the color transferring clay to the fabric.
Related Work
There is a considerable amount of work in the HCI space centered around sustainability. The work around printing in biomaterials in the Hand and Machine lab served as the initial inspiration for this project. Designing around sustainability is a relatively new concept for me. The journal article “Designing for Sustainability: A Philosophy for Ecologically Intentional Design” by Nathan Stegall provided me a profound reframing of the scope and application of the research done in and around sustainability. Stegal posits that sustainable design has to go beyond eco-friendly products by inspiring the behaviors and lifestyle choices that will contribute to a sustainable society. This concept is the heart of what I wanted to research for my final project. How can computational fabrication support people in choosing more a sustainable option? The solution is possible by combining the eco-friendly material with computational fabrication.
To be sustainable, my project required a cyclical nature and an emphasis on wearables. A considerable amount of the research in sustainable wearables including, scoby leather, algnyl vinyl, and dyes grown from microbial ecosystem found on people’s skin has been conduced by Dr. Fionna Bell and other researchers.
Beyond her research, other work on sustainable wearables includes dissolvable wearables made from bio foam yarns and “bio based wearable air filtering skin”. Both highlight meeting a need beyond the bio material itself. In the paper, “Designing Dissolving Wearables” and the demonstration “Biodegradable Bio-based Material for Wearable Air Filtering Skin” both address meeting a design or practical function beyond the material itself.
Finally, I needed to research how to dye with biomaterials. Kaliko a Germany based natural-dye studio documents their process and helps facilitate others in dyeing material naturally.
Process
My initial plan was to craft a make-up application and a textile print application. The code seemed connected to both material applications. They both require inserting an image slicing it and manipulating the z axis for the appropriate material application. As I worked with the beet powder, my code, and research on make-up recipes it quickly became apparent that the only connection was the ingredient beet powder. While each material has merit, the resulting object and code should be tailored to the material and not an ingredient.
Since the code should remove barriers for people to use the more sustainable option of dying with beet power it needed to be easy to use. So, I did not want to use the .bmp plug in from class and I wanted to support more image types. Unfortunately, the library I wanted to use was not supported. In the end I did limit the input to a bitmap. I read in each pixel and mapped the color to an array of 1 or 0s that would inform the turtle how to traverse the image. The turtle travels the width of the photo by the height of the file and lifts its pen depending on the information form the previously bult array.
The digital output was beautiful but not printable with the beet powder clay I used.
The turtle marched along picking up its pen correctly, but the clay would not stick to the fabric. I needed a continuous thread of extrusion. So, I used a program I had written that spirals a polygon out and up. This allowed me to see how well the fabric would hold the dye.
I wanted the project to have the option to be temporary, provide crisp details, and solid color. I tried sodium Alginate as a mordant, an ingredient that sets dye to the fiber. I tried two recipes: one with sodium alginate and one without.
| Recipe 1 | Recipe 2 |
| Beat powder Methyl Cellulose Xanthium GumWater | Beat powder Sodium Alginate Salt Water |
The first recipe was the better of the two. It had a more linear rheology and allowed the dye to be completely washed out.
Outcome
The dye transfers to fabric well providing the user solid color, crisp details, and semi-permeant dye.
Future Work
In the future work will include code changes and further material exploration. The code needs the square tracing algorithm so that the sliced images will have longer continuous threads of extrusion. Switching the code environment to Rhino 8 as the support a better python image processing library supports more image types beyond a bit map. More tests on dye additives, mordants, and heat application needs further investigation. Below are the colors and mordants to be explored:
| Yellow | Onion Skin | |||
| Red/Pink | Avadados | Beet | roses | rasperies |
| Green | Spinach | cammomile | red onion skin | |
| Blue/Purple | blueberries | |||
| Black/Brown | Walnuthusks | |||
| Mordants | Iron acetate | Sodium Alginate | ||
Reflection
Over the course of this project the importance of the code and the material became obvious. The code needs to allow the user to interact with the material in a unique way; The code also needs to accommodate the physical limits of the material. My project began with a broad unfocused scope, by deleted the makeup application and narrowing my focus to just circular fashion I was more excited about my code and the material application. I also learned how easy it is for me to conflate the ingredients with the material. At the start of this project the make-up and fabric dye felt so similar but after working with the code, material, and even the philosophy laid out in Stegal’s article highlight how different the two concepts are. I will wear the one shirt I made, and I want to make some fabric that has the design that demonstrated the color transferring clay’s ability to capture crisp details.
References and links
About. (n.d.). Kaliko. https://www.kaliko.co/pages/about
Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Lily M Gabriel, Mikhaila Friske, Shanel Wu, Sasha De Koninck, Laura Devendorf, and Mirela Alistar. 2023. Designing Dissolving Wearables. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing & the 2023 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computing (UbiComp/ISWC ’23 Adjunct). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 286–290. https://doi-org.libproxy.unm.edu/10.1145/3594739.3610781
Jasmine Daniel Gardner, Hsin-Liu (Cindy) Kao, and Anil Netravali. 2023. Biodegradable Bio-based Material for Wearable Air Filtering Skin. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2022 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and the 2022 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp/ISWC ’22 Adjunct). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 35–37. https://doi-org.libproxy.unm.edu/10.1145/3544793.3560320
Projects – hand and machine. (n.d.). https://handandmachine.org/index.php/category/projects/
research — fiona bell. (n.d.-a). Fiona Bell. https://www.fionaabell.com/research