Program Overview

Program Overview

The Algorithmic Textiles Design course, offered in Spring 2021, explores the intersection of code and textiles fabrication. This iteration of the course focuses on improvised and virtual textiles fabrication, including visual simulation.

Description

Textile artifacts are ubiquitous, from clothing to carpets to car seats, and are often produced by sophisticated, computer-controlled fabrication machinery. The course discusses how code touches textiles fabrication, including design tools, simulators, and machine control languages. Students work on a series of multi-week, open-ended projects, using code to create patterns for modern sewing/embroidery, weaving, and knitting machines, and then send these patterns to be fabricated in the textiles lab.

Prerequisites

Familiarity with at least one programming language is required.

Evaluation

Students are graded out of 60 points, divided as follows:

• 20 points: Class Exercises / Participation
• 40 points: Projects

Schedule

The schedule is subject to adjustment and includes the following topics:

• Knitting: Course Overview, Algorithms and fabrication, Knitting, Big ideas in Machine Knitting, Guest Lecture (Jenny Lin): The Transfer Planning Problem
• Weaving: Drafting, double cloth, Algorithmically-Generated Weaving Patterns, Weaving Side Views, Guest Lecture (Vidya Narayanan): How to make 3D objects with both knitting and weaving
• Sewing: Cut-and-sew, Embroidery, Quilting, How Machines Sew, CNC Sewing Data formats, Guest Lecture (Ella Moore): changing material properties with embroidery

Projects

• Knitting Project: due before class, 12 February
• Weaving Project: due before class, 12 March
• Embroidery Project: due before class, 26 March
• Final Project: due before class, 7 May

Other Versions

This course was also offered in Spring 2019 and Spring 2020 with some variations.