JTATM - North Carolina State University

DESIGN AND ENGINEERING INTERFACE CONFERENCE IN SCOTLAND

Nancy B. Powell, Associate Professor
Traci May-Plumlee, Assistant Professor

The International Textile Design and Engineering Conference (INTEDEC) was held at Heriot -Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland in September, 2003. The theme was “Fibrous Assemblies at the Design and Engineering Interface”. The conference was an opportunity to “bridge the gaps between aesthetics and technology research and to develop synergies between researchers in these two fields”. Textile design and technology have been evolving in parallel, with little interaction. The lack of synergy between design and engineering hinders a huge potential for developing new products and processes and for advancing the competitiveness of the industry.

NCSU College of Textiles was represented not only by presentations featuring different perspectives on development of three dimensional textile products and electronic textiles but also by a poster about the Anni Albers Scholars program displayed in the exhibition area.

Professor R. Alan Donaldson shared the results of his research in three dimensional weaving. Professor Donaldson directed the development project assigned to four College of Textiles' student teams in TAM 472. Donaldson reflected upon the challenge to designers and engineers to work together creatively.

Dr. Traci May-Plumlee presented on 3D virtual simulation of fabric drape. The paper, entitled “Evaluating 3D Drape Simulations: Methods and Metrics”, focused on techniques developed by the research team for evaluating the effectiveness of virtual drape simulations by comparison with actual fabric drapes. The methods are applicable to fabrics draped over a simple shape as well as the more complex drape of a garment.

Associate Professor Nancy Powell presented “Mass Customization in Transportation Textiles through Shaped Three-Dimensional Knitting” examining the interaction of design and engineering in the automotive supply chain. The potential for customized products using a three dimensional shaped knitting technology was discussed.

Intelligent or SMART textiles were also an important focus of the conference. Dr. Ed Grant presented research findings from the NCSU research team (Grant, Luthy, Mattos, Braly, Seyam, Ghosh, Dhawan, and Natarajan) on “Developing Portable Acoustic Arrays on a Large-Scale E-Textile Substrate."

To share a sense of the flavor of the conference, highlights of just a few of the diverse presentations are described in the following paragraphs. Conference papers in their entirety are available in Fibrous Assemblies at the Design and Engineering Interface, INTEDEC 2003 Book of Proceedings (ISBN 0-9546162-0-0)

Some of the most fascinating presentations of the conference reported work that melded highly specialized methods derived from applied technologies and functional problems with intensely creative goals and unconventional output. F. Geesin reported on work with metalized textiles and the evolution of that work from its inception in “Collaborate and be Surprised!”. The work explored application of metals to textile substrates and was accomplished with the support of industry partners and a collaborator. Initially the goal was to create conductive textiles for electro-textile applications. Over time, the collaborative effort inspired creative applications for the metalized fabrics. At the conference presentation, Geesin shared exquisite examples of jewelry, bags, vessels, and art fabrics utilizing the metalized fabrics. In another paper “Chitosan – Exploring the Design Potential”, B. McCabe presented explorations resulting in novel textiles with unique aesthetic properties. Chitosan is used currently in textile applications primarily for imparting antibacterial properties to textiles. In the reported work, Chitosan was used to bond layers of textiles and coat textile substrates. Additionally, it was integrated with textiles into composite resins. The resulting composites with their unique aesthetic properties are being studied for interior architecture applications.