Alive Textiles

Alive Textiles was a professional development workshop in the field of smart/active/responsive materials, exploring the boundaries between materials and media. The workshop was designed for the students of Norwich School of Art and Design as well as interested local artists. The participants had three days to create concepts for responsive garments, using off-the-shelf “dumb” materials smeared with inks and films from the school’s printing department, analysed for their internal, inherent “alive” properties and augmented with ideas of what they would become if they were truly smart. In the course of the workshop, students’ ideas were visibly progressing: they began with garments with integrated video cameras, mobile phones and colour-changing fabrics which evolved into a range of imaginary environments: growing forests of worms, affected by the human movement within them, empathic homes with embedded mood detectors, happiness inducing chairs, and “cocooning” aids in the form of portable coat-chambres.