Edinburgh Napier University

  Digital Lace was selected for the International Symposium of Wearable Computers (ISWC), 2014 Design Exhibition, Seattle and won the ISWC 2014 Jury Award: Fibre Art. The work was showcased at EMP Museum and Microsoft Research, Seattle USA. The work was represented at Microsoft Research for a further 6 weeks.

Digital Lace combines traditional (black Holland Linen) with cutting edge materials using (newly developed) white-scattering liquid crystal thermochromic dye and polymer optical fibres. The responsive materials are activated through the use of specially designed light-emitting diodes (LEDs) devices and heat control mechanisms and uses micro-controllers to sequence and activate light and colour-change in the following ways: using liquid crystal thermochromic dyes which change from opaque (white) to transparent (or coloured) on temperature change; using optical fibre to create light loss along the fibre length; and, using colour and lighting control to trigger a collision of light, colour and tonal effects within the material to create novel light and shadow interplay.

The submission to the Fiber arts category presented new material concepts as Digital Lace: a novel, multifaceted textile. Digital Lace explicitly pools together the digital-craft skills base and disparate expertise of printed textile practitioner and thermochromic specialist, Sara Robertson and constructed textile practitioner and light-emitting optical fibre specialist, Sarah Taylor. Within the context of ‘smart’, material development and experimentation, Digital lace exploits and amalgamates the responsive technologies of dye and fibre with digital-control.

An extended abstract was part of ISWC '14 Adjunct: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers: Adjunct Program. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2014. p. 93-97.