Designblog

As part of their program students of the Textile department TXT, are asked to research one textile technique –its history, its etymology, its philosophy– and give a lecture about it for a variety of different audiences.

René Shiro Grögli says: “when it came to my presentations of the technique I researched, I asked myself one question above all: What can I, and only I, tell the audience about my subject? What is there to tell that can’t be easily looked up on the internet?

Faced with a talk in front of 20 Rietveld Basic Year students, I decided to give them a crash-course in crochet basics. I brought 10 meters long fabric stripes for all the students and taught them how to do the two most simple and fundamental crochet stitches, the chain stitch and the single crochet, by using their hands as crochet needles.
My intention was to give them a tool that they would ideally use for their own projects. We only had a couple of minutes. The results are a beautiful series of small crocheted objects. Some of them are meant to be worn”.

concept/photo's by René Shiro Grögli /crochet results by students of B group

download this small collection [pdf] on classic and contempory crochet or look at my instructional slide show part 1 & 2

In our daily vocabulary we often use textile-related words in order to stress the importance of unity, collective work and all kinds of networking programms.
We knit and we knot quite a lot in language, as if we are experienced weavers and knotters, but most of the time we don’t have the slightest idea how you actually do make a knot.

In this project students are researching one textile technique:
its history, its etymology, its philosophy

Since Plato used weaving loom as a model for how a state is operating, more philosophers are inspired to use textile techniques as a base for dealing with concepts. The question in this project is, how to liberate a technique from its tradition and its confinement.

"3 textile students will performe their research" is part of Basic Year design program

FAMILIAR DOMESTICS

Most living spaces use textiles as membranes and interfaces. When we sleep at night we inhabit an almost entirely textile place. We imagine extending familiar textile aplications into the built environment to create fully integrated textile architecture inspired by biological systems.
One of the domestic textiles we have been focusing on is a window covering. Making such a design responsive alow it to grow, metabolise and synthesise with qualities in its immediate surroundings. It can be light emitting, temperature regulating, structural and adaptive.
Folowing along this trajectory is a world of materials that truly facilitate the relationship between the inside and the outside. They are no longer inert matter, but active and able to respond to stimuli such as light, heat, water and electrical energy

Geophysical Log: Location: Loop.pH studio London UK Date: 10/04/2007 Time: 22:12:39

GEODESIC DISTANCE

Looking at plants spinning, weaving and knotting themselves around features in their environment, we cannot but think how they inspired humans to manipulate fiber and thread.
It is the nature of many plants to climb and attach themselves tangentially to establish a structurally stable and energetically efficient link. In the image below, can be seen a knotted end of a tentacle that a passion flower uses to anchor in space.
The two black rods are a fiber composite and part of a woven space-frame we are developing for plants to grow into and consume. The space-frame uses tangential joints exclusively and could easily be scaled to fit many life-form’s requirements.

Geophysical Log: Location: Domestic Things, Flow Gallery London UK Date: 18/03/2007 Time: 12:37:55

INTERDEPENDECE VS. DEPENDENCE

A woven textile is an example where many individual fibres, weak when singular, provide great strengh in unison as they interlink and cross one another. The language of textiles is often used to describe systems in our world that overlap and work together to create a harmony.
The construction of fabrics can be described as a parallel for co-existence and inter-dependence in a sociological context. An urban fabric is interwoven with people, neighborhoods, homes, work places and institutions an a community is strengthened when diversity is present.

tangent (raaklijn) . go off at a ~ (een gedachte sprong maken)

Selection of 3 texts out of 10 by Loop.pH [Mathias Gmachl and Rachel Wingfield], published in "Responsive Textile Environments" edited by Sarah Bonnemaison and Christine Macythe Canedian Design Research Network. source: Over/Under, Under/Over . notes . Txt(textile) Department . June 2008