Statement of Objectives
MIT Media Arts & Sciences

I work with some of the most talented artists and engineers in the world, including Janet Echelman, Clayton Binkley, Dr. Alessandro Beghini, Professor Caitlin Mueller, and many others. These inspiring minds have taught me that great ideas do not come from individuals; they come from communities. This has led me to seek out inventive and curious communities engaged in the prototyping of technologies that amplify human expression. The MIT Media Lab is precisely such a community, particularly the groups: Critical Matter, Future Sketches, and Tangible Media. As a member of the Media Lab, I would like to collaborate with Hiroshi Ishii on responsive textile interfaces composed of programmable fibers, explore virtual looms for pattern synthesis with Zach Lieberman, and study textiles’ interactions with the body with Behnaz Farahi,

THE PAST: No More Holes

For seven years, I have worked with artist Janet Echelman on the design and fabrication of building scale textiles. One of the first projects I designed was 1.26, a suspended bowl of irregular shape composed of concentric rings of net 100 feet in diameter. As a new member of her studio, I followed the established process at the time: guess, check, and iterate different arrangements of net panels, and trim excess material. 1.26 premiered in 2019 at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong to great acclaim, but I noticed a flaw. A couple of knots had slipped along a seam, producing a tiny hole. Though easily repaired, this hole drove me to restructure the design process at Studio Echelman.

Today, the studio’s nets are shaped with a library of inverse design tools I have developed in collaboration with designers, fabricators, engineers, and mathematicians. Composite textile geometry is form-found and patterned using automated processes. Instead of wasteful trimming with shears, the shape of each net is encoded into variable dimensions during the looming process. Incorporating computation into the process has significantly reduced fabrication time, cost, waste, and error. The results are stronger, more beautiful structures. There are no more holes, but seams remain an area of interest.

THE VISION: Everything Big Has Seams

The Media Lab’s textile research, often showcases small, seamless prototypes. Working with building sized textiles has taught me to appreciate seams. Everything big has seams. Collaborating with the structural engineers of the world’s tallest building, I used seams to redirect and distribute forces in textiles. Consulting master loom technicians at the industrial supply house Diamond Nets, I designed processes using seams for dimensional control. In collaboration with MIT Professor, Caitlin Mueller, and SMArchS graduate Adam Burke, I developed workflows that use seams to transform flat topologies into cellular structures. A critical feature of seams is their control of textile direction in composites. The direction of a textile derives from its orientation during looming. Analogous to woodgrain, direction dictates strength, stretch, and shape. As with carpentry the directions of joined pieces can be manipulated. In my portfolio, you will see unusual topologies benefiting from the controlled reorientation of textile direction. Seam design is a powerful way to manipulate directionality, transforming one dimension of control into many.

COMPOSITE STRUCTURE: Scalable Textiles Reduce CO2 Emissions

At the Media Lab, I plan to develop tools for optimizing patching and seaming of composite textiles. Beautiful assemblies like Wicaksono’s KnitworkVR rely on traditional seams and heavy wooden supports. What if the textile was the support? Textiles can serve as alternatives to steel in reinforced concrete. Seams are necessary for the scalable use of this method. Employing optimization strategies such as those studied by MIT Professor Caitlin Mueller, we could discover unintuitive seaming protocols. One might use seams to distribute forces, accelerate fabrication, or reduce material use. Optimized composites would enable larger, bespoke structures. Given concrete’s outsized carbon footprint and the reduction of its use afforded by textile reinforcement, scalable textiles will dramatically reduce CO2 emissions.

COMPOSITE MOTION: Oriented Textiles with Kinetic Fibers

Composite textiles increase the dimensional controls possible with kinetic fibers under development in the FibeRobo and OmniFiber projects within Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media group. A composite with actuated fibers is capable of many more dimensions of movement than a seamless garment. My collaborations with Princeton Professor, Rebecca Lazier, on composite textile environments for the dance performance, Noli Timere, showed me the potential of interactive, moving textiles. As with muscle fiber, the direction of textiles is linear. Like muscular tissues, the compositing of oriented textiles with kinetic fibers would enable complex motions with mechanical advantage and increased precision. Similarly, composite textiles would increase the dimensions of interaction possible through sensing fibers like SensorKnits. By incorporating both programmable and sensing fibers into composite structures, one could construct soft, transformable interfaces capable of complex interactions. Potential uses range from soft smart devices to responsive clothing and fluid architectural structures. Notably, the programming of these objects could be embedded into the material itself, rather than handled through software, resulting in simpler, more robust products which do not require external power supplies.

COMPOSITE PATTERN: Manipulating Seam Flow

Seams play a critical role in pattern design. Patterns are (unfortunately) often designed on flat grids. I was responsible for the pattern and form of Janet Echelman’s recent installation, Butterfly Rest Stop. Given the project’s 9,000 ft2 scale, coarse fishing net looms with constrained capabilities were required. To circumvent this limitation, I used seams to transform discrete panels into an unfolded, spherical color space. The result was the most sophisticated pattern of any of her sculptures to date. Working with Zach Leiberman, I could create interactive tools that enable artists to transform patterns through seam grammars. During the design of Current, a 230 ft installation of nested textile arches, I created tools that enabled me to translate gestural drawings into forms and patterns, flowing seamlessly through each piece of sculpture. A similar system could be used for manipulating seam flows across topologies to encode structural pattern in materials otherwise incapable of pattern. I am particularly inspired by the work of Vera van de Seyp, which demonstrates how weave structures inform pattern. Building off her research, generative seaming would allow designers to code complex information into large textiles, perhaps even the symbolic or typographic data of Tomorrow’s Typography.

COMPOSITE TRANSFORMATION: Encoding Color and Pattern at the Material Level

Finally, environmentally scaled textiles with customizable pattern flow and directional kinetic fibers have obvious potential in the arts, something I am keen to explore with Behnaz Farahi. Projects like Iridescence, demonstrate the ways in which motion can transform pattern and even color. While that project relies upon lenticular optics, the incorporation of structural color within kinetic textiles has the potential to encode color and pattern transformation at the material level. MIT Professor Matthias Kolle has already developed fibers which change color in response to transformation. By embedding these fibers within kinetic textiles, one could produce programmable, woven pixel arrays, clothing whose pattern changes with movement, or architectural spaces whose color changes in response to environmental conditions.

THE FUTURE: Scalable Composites Change Everything

My work on the design and production of monumental textiles makes me uniquely qualified to exploit the opportunities present in scalable textile composites. The inherently structural logic within textiles means they are ripe for the programming of form, pattern, motion, and interaction, and their scalable application will change everything: from computer interfaces, to clothing, the structures we inhabit, and how we express ourselves. With a strong background in computational design, fabrication, and machine control I am confident that I will be able to contribute significantly to ongoing textile research at the Media Lab, while also learning from groups like Tangible Media, Critical Matter, and Future Sketches. Thank you for your consideration.