Radical Change In Smart Textile

1165 Words5 Pages

Background: from traditional crafts to smart textile services

Crafts & smart textiles for sustainability
The environmental and societal concerns risen from textile and garment production areas, are well known and covered by now (Allwood, Laursen, de Rodriguez, & Bocken, 2006; Aus, 2011; Fletcher, 2008). The development of smart textile products, which lie in the intersection of fashion and technology, raises additional sustainability challenges for the traditional garment and electronics industries. The ecological concerns have been covered in the PhD thesis of Köhler (Köhler, 2013). Textiles and technology, both innovation and fashion driven industries, have their share in the global consumption pace and the concerns involved. However, …show more content…

Sewing needles are believed to be around already thirty thousand years. The insights regarding sustainability from the long tradition have been noticed and translated for the developing entirely new area of smart textiles. The aim is to regain some of the long-lived principles such as quality, individualised approach (tailoring) and value for handwork that got neglected when moving towards efficiency and standardisation. Smart textiles allow new values and ways of use to emerge into the textile industry. With their dynamic properties and collaborative approach (Bhömer, Tomico, Kleinsmann, Kuusk, & Wensveen, 2012) they call for a radical change in the garment industry. For radical change, paradigms need to change rather than the materials we use, the way garments have been made, or how many times we use one cradle-to-grave item. “There’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow about paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a new way of seeing” (Meadows, 1997, p. 11). Therefore, it is important to consider the new dimensions the properties of the smart materials open …show more content…

It has gone through a lot of changes in the recent past, including going from single color to stripes, from reddish brown color to reddish and orange, the usual stripes got accompanied by patterned stripes, lower edge got decorated with a crochet lace. Since the 1930s a lemon yellow skirt with a flower-embroidered border has been iconic to the island. (Puppart, 2011) QR-coded Embroidery (Figure 1) concept is realised in a project showing fairy-tales. A pillows embedded with embroidered folkloric Quick Response (QR) codes that when scanned start showing a video of a fairy-tale. The fairy-tale originates from the same region as the patterns and colors used as an inspiration in the embroidery design. The QR code embroidered on top of a textile can be scanned with any freely available QR scaning software. The application needs the Internet connection to open the resulting website with the video in the smartphone browser. The website can be updated constantly, therefore it can show different fairytales in different times of the day, months of the year

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