Printable smart materials offer textile designers a range of changeable colours, with the potential to redefine the expressive properties of static textiles. However, this comes with the challenge of understanding how the printing process may need to be adapted for these novel materials. This research explores and exemplifies the properties and potential of electroluminescent inks as printable smart colours for textiles, in order to facilitate an understanding of designing complex surface patterns with electroluminescent inks. Three conventional textile print methods – colour mixing, halftone rasterization, and overlapping – have been investigated through experimental design research to expand the design potential of electroluminescent inks. The result presents a set of methods to create various color mixtures and design complex patterns. It offers recipes for print formulation and documents the outcomes, offering a new design resource for textile surface pattern designers to promote creativity in design, and provides fundamental knowledge for the creation of patterns on textiles using electroluminescent inks.

The past decades of research on color and light yielded vast knowledge supporting their informed use in architectural design. While there currently exists a rich body of knowledge and methods geared to affect the perception of depth and form in tiled, opaque architectural surfaces, not many such methods have been developed for double-curved, transparent, in-mass colored surfaces. The perception of depth and form in these surfaces relies on a complex blend of parameters, such as color combinations, illumination source, angle of viewing, location of shadows and reflections, material thickness and grade of transparency. To determine the visual effects caused by some of these parameters, experiments based on visual observations were carried out involving handcrafted, in-mass colored, undulant architectural surfaces. The insights from the experiments then served to develop four color strategies for architectural surface design harnessing the discovered effects in diverse ways. Through this, the study has sought first to observe and understand the effects of color and light in perceiving undulant surfaces, and second to highlight the potentials of harnessing these effects in the design of expressive architectural elements. The main insight from the study is that informed and deliberate application of color and light yields a wide range of potentially interesting perceptual effects in double-curved architectural surfaces, such as spatial filtering, gradient screening, vibrant massing and animate reshaping. Such effects, applied in an architectural context, can help to fulfill the demand for physical environmental enrichment in the digital era.

Digitalization is one of the main grounds for discussion in the textile manufacturing industry. As in other creative fields, digitalization in textile design has brought craftsmanship together with work using digital tools and mechanical processes to creatively embed advanced knowledge in structural design and this dualism is even stronger in the field of knitwear design. For years, knitting technologies have been considered far from creativity and entirely delegated to the expertise of technicians, and design education has often focused on fostering artistic expression by teaching highly creative manual/mechanical processes. In the ongoing shift towards digitalization and the challenges of Industry 4.0, research and education in knitting design must redefine the programming of industrial machines as a tool for designers to push their experimental creativity together with their technical knowledge. This article reports an investigation made by the authors in the two different contexts of the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano and of the Swedish School of Textile in Borås. Using the method of constructive alignment (Biggs, J. B. & Tang, C. S., 2011), the investigation set up a comparison of two practice-based methods for training designers in programming industrial knitting machines. The authors mapped the teaching, learning activities and expected learning outcomes specific for each course and analysed quintessential aspects that occur in the learning process in the transition from manual to digital tools. The research had the aim of understanding what kind of knowledge should be transferred, in which way and with which purpose, to make programming an integral and effective part of the learning process for knit designers. The data collected have been used to highlight similarities and differences between the two programmes, identify impactful items and open future research that could foster improvements with shared solutions.

Digital fabrication technology presents an unfamiliar territory for textile design,thus requiring exploration and analysis of the emergent forms of textile crafting andmateriality. Through practice-based research methodology, this research examines the intersection of two fabrication methods: industrial knitting and 3D filament printing, with the aim of outlining a hybrid material territory for 3D textile composites. Accordingly, the research addresses the notion of textile as a multi-material system. The physical results are presented as a material library of samples which have been produced through two methods: i) the exploration of geometric tessellations to generate self-folding surfaces by direct printing on non-elastic knitted structures; ii) the exploration of pattern arrays to generate self-forming surfaces by direct printing on pre-stressed knitted structures. Using this hybrid approach to textile crafting the research discusses the aesthetic possibilities of the fusion of these two technologies, and the potential for development within the Industry 4.0 model.

In textile design, the characteristics of a textured surface are the result of the properties of the materials, the textile techniques used, and the colour mixtures associated with each technique. The perception of colour on textured textiles is dependent on the angles of viewing and incidence of light on the surface. Accordingly, when analyzing the perception of the colour of pile textiles such as velvet, we observe that the orientation of the piles on the surface affects the perception of colour. The perception of colour and its transformation depends on whether the light is reflected off the side or the end of the yarn. By bringing do it yourself (DIY) materials into the textile design field, this research questions how biomaterials such as bioplastic can be further developed using textile surface design methods, and how the relationship between texture and colours can be advanced in the design of complex textured surfaces. The method develops a hybrid strategy for designing a new material category combining DIY and digital tools, which offers a more sustainable alternative to conventional textile materials. Moreover, the method proposed builds on two major aspects: explorations of bioplastic materials and their impacts on colour design and selection, and an analysis of changes in the visual perception of coloured surfaces with regard to differences in texture, the positioning of a light source, and angle of viewing. The results are methods of creating complex colour combinations and textural surfaces using near-adjacent and complementary colours and the intrinsic transparency property of bioplastics.

Precision of materialized designs is the conventional goal of digital fabrication in architecture. Recently, however, an alternative concept has emerged which refashions the imprecisions of digital processes into creative opportunities. While the computational design community has embraced this idea, its novelty results in a yet incomplete understanding. Prompted by the challenge of the still missing knowledge, this study explored imprecision in four digital fabrication approaches to establish how it influences the aesthetic attributes of materialized designs. Imprecision occurrences for four different digitally aided materialization processes were characterized. The aesthetic features emerging from these imprecisions were also identified and the possibilities of tampering with them for design exploration purposes were discussed. By considering the aesthetic potentials of deliberate imprecision, the study has sought to challenge the canon of high fidelity in contemporary computational design and to argue for imprecision in computation that shapes a new generation of designs featuring the new aesthetic of computational imperfection.