The new industrial revolution:3D printing

3rd March 2010

3D printing and rapid prototyping have received much attention in recent years. Now a new generation of companies are experimenting with how the technology can be applied in a commercial context.

Key themes

.The first steps toward mass-customisation are happening now, by offering co-design and co-creation. As these gather momentum, they will impact on how consumers view products and future retailing

.Products can be modified in real-time. Consumers can change the form, colour and material of a product in their own homes, purchase it when they are ready and have it delivered within weeks

.Designs and products can be adapted on every level as new information and needs emerge Using the internet to transfer data and design makes global business possible even for small companies

.Natural resources are further preserved by eliminating pre-manufactured components Consumers will take more control of product and will therefore be more attached to it

.It's not just about co-design. Think about how 3D printing challenges the physical conventions of design

New possibilities at retail

3D printing is a type of rapid manufacturing technology. It has the potential to enable consumers to print everything from food to domestic objects, textiles to shoes.
As customers demand a greater freedom of choice, designers and brands are faced with new challenges in their product offerings. Such technologies offer product modification in terms of colour, form and materials. This opens up an entirely new relationship of codesign between the customer and the designer/brand.
This technology is beginning to redefine the roles of the retailer and designer. Print or fab labs (short for fabrication laboratories) are set to become new retail outlets. There consumers can customise objects to their specification and will be able to visit websites to download new products to print themselves.
The technology is environmentally responsible, with no material waste. With no need to carry stock or ship parts, each product has a very low carbon footprint.

Connected thinking

3D printing currently manufactures products by building up layers of plastic, metal and nylon powder - it is already capable of printing moving parts.
The first generation of companies to make serious use of technology is emerging now. One such example is Fab Lab, a fabrication laboratory workspace that uses rapid prototyping machines. The concept, which originated in Amsterdam, was created in collaboration with the Media Laboratory at MIT.
Fab Labs now has 35 outposts, including a location planned in Manchester. Each Fab Lab shares core capabilities, so that people and projects can be shared across them. The project aims to develop programmable molecular assemblers that can make almost anything.

Connected globally the Fab Labs are open source that enable users within the network to brainstorm and learn from each other. They have seen Norwegian shepherds create mobile phones to track sheep, while a South African government and business-backed project is creating simple $10 internet-ready computers that connect to televisions.

Democratic design development

Another company reaching out to consumers directly is London-based Digital Forming/UCOD. Due for launch early 2010, the company aims to offer mass-customisation. It provides customers with ready- made designs that they can adapt and modify before being produced by 3D printing.
Another company already using 3D printing exploring the potential of co-design is Toronto-based interiors retailer Umbra. Housed within the brand's flagship store is a rapid prototyping machine. The technology enables customers to interact with Umbra's designers, working on new products and prototypes designed on 3D software and produced with printers.

The next step for co-design

Taking a different stance is Peter Hermans a recent graduate from the Technical University, Eindhoven. His graduation project - developed in collaboration with Freedom of Creation - suggests taking the idea of mass-customisation and co-design to the next level.
Instead of enabling the cusmtomer to edit an existing design, Hermans' developed the concept of jewellery company Jewelco, which offers customers the tools to interact with a professional jewellery designer and co-design a completely new and unique product.

Future Impact

Philip Delamore, director of the digital fashion studio at London College of Fashion, thinks such technologies will have a huge impact on the future of design and manufacturing.
Delamore believes that as student graduates are exposed to these technologies, they will reject off-the- shelf components and begin to pushthe design industry to invest. With the ability to pass designs around the world digitally as data, points of contact between design and manufacture will change dramatically.
Founder of Freedom of Creation Janne Kyttänen agrees: "At Freedom of Creation we believe in a future where data is the design product and where products are distributed in the same way images and music travel through the internet today."

Shoe designers Marloes ten Bhömer and Kerry Luft are two designers using these technologies to push the boundaries of design. Ten Bhömer's rotation-mould shoes showcase via a custom-designed mechanism shapes not possible to be reached though traditional processes. Luft has created impossible heels for her shoes from rapid-prototyped titanium.
The work of both designers shows how the potential of 3D printing reaches beyond customer inclusion to challenge and extend the possibilties of product design.
© WGSN 2010

Design Academy Eindhoven

11th January 2010

WGSN's Materials team visited Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week; in this report we highlight work from the Academy's 2009 graduates and alumini, showcasing thoughtful and innovative work from BA and MA product design students. Students at the Design Academy have a very strong antenna and each year the graduation show gives us an insight into their view of the future, whether it be through material choices, product or emotional design. This year is no different, and picked up on by many of the students is the fact that the world is calling for old, almost forgotten processes and techniques to be re-evaluated and given a new lease of life. The best of the old and the new are being brought together, and students have embraced such thinking in their final projects, through memory, technique, material and/or technology. WGSN's Materials team highlights key themes emerging from the show, looking specifically at interesting and unusual material choices as well as innovative design thinking.

Ceramic surfaces Materials inspiration: Design Academy Eindhoven

By far the biggest material and surface message across Dutch design week, many students explored both the beauty and resilience of ceramics as a material or a surface covering. Pared-back and simple, the ceramics of choice offered up a purity of thought that was key to the show. Textile made fragile by Djim Berger plays with our perceptions of hard versus soft and delicate versus robust. Wool yarns are pulled through and coated in porcelain clay and fused together to create a thin blanket which is then fired in the oven. The heat burns the wool off leaving behind a delicate wool-like ceramic exterior. Suggesting the shelf itself becomes a precious object, Berger sees the shelf as the perfect place to display valued items while being a display piece itself. KP107F is the product number of a type of porcelain. Paring it back to its simplest form, designermaker Eva Gevaert explored the characteristics and possibilities that porcelain affords as a material. Driven by the material and the process rather than the final product, she went about experimenting with different thicknesses in order to create the perfect misfired bowl. Intrigued by what would go wrong during the casting and firing process, Gevaert used five moulds and experimented with laying filled moulds on their sides to create varying thicknesses within one form, or let the porcelain slip, weighting the vessel in one direction or another, simply trying to create new forms and visually stimulating material experiments within the constraints of the five moulds.

Weird materials
Embracing the ideal that process dictates form, designer Frank Winnubst has experimented with different materials to, as he says, 'surprise himself'. While experimenting, he discovered that by pouring resin into balloons he could create weird and wonderful shapes and forms, or "Manufractals", as he terms them. What is exciting about his work is the organic process by which it has come about and the resulting new material aesthetic. Also pushing the boundaries of material exploration is designer Anne Wagemaker with her project, 'Delicatessen'. A materials study inspired by still life paintings of food and tableware, Wagemaker has kneaded, dripped and manipulated epoxy clay, epoxy resin and polyester to create new forms that together become a series of objects that make up jewellery pieces or weird and wonderful still life studies.

Wood
Fitting entirely with the overall ethos of pared-back simplicity at the show, wood and copper were two materials of choice. Used in very simple ways, modern thinking and processes updated the simple beauty of such materials. Wood is given a playful and sophisticated twist at Dutch Invertuals by designer Mieke Meijer, with her 'Alter Ego' cabinet, a cabinet that has a split personality. A multi-faceted cabinet, it houses five other cabinets in one, while the 17th century arm chair design laser-etched onto its doors offers a glimpse to its other personalities. Working with MDF, Bart Hess partnered with graduate Harm Rensink to design a dressing-up wardrobe. Using household bleach and cutout dusters, they have created a faux-animal-print on MDF for the decorative inside of the cabinet doors. To counterbalance this they have patterned the front using a geometric design using hair peroxide. What is interesting about their work is the simplicity of the materials used: the interplay of mundane domestic items such as dusters and bleach and the theatrics of an ornate dressing cabinet. Fragments of Nature by Lex Pott explores the natural beauty of wood and plays with the formality and manmade perfection of industry and nature. Inspired by the wood-processing industry, whereby a tree is felled, stripped of its bark and branches and then cut into a geometric form, his table and bench showcase the finest that this industry can offer in perfect order, partnered with nature's finest. Perfectly cut and planed wood surfaces are paired with naturally formed tree branches that are left almost in their natural state. Being reproducible was an important requirement for Pott as the point is that he is celebrating the uniqueness and varying beauty of wood.

Copper
Letting the material tell a story, David Derksen's Copper cabinet is constructed from 0.1mm-thick copperfoil, giving it a structured yet fragile look, with the folds in the foil almost reminiscent of paper. Also showcased at the Re-kwi-siet exhibition - a collaborative project between Bart Hess, Harm Rensink and Esther de Groot - traditional theatre lights are updated and given an exquisite appeal in brushed copper. The lights offer an interactive element too, flashing more brightly in response to the camera flashes of visitors to the exhibition, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of a professional photography studio. Memories Sustainability is no longer a luxury, but rather a prerequisite to almost all design decisions - not just in terms of material choice, but also in unearthing old traditions or bringing an emotional attachment backto products, encouraging the user to keep them for a lifetime. Entitled 'Portable Memory', the work of graduate Mandy Emmen is thought-provoking not only in terms of the materials used - wood, metal and resin - but the poignancy of her understanding of the relationship between the touch or smell of an object or material and its assosciation with our memories. Having been collecting objects all her life with a memory attached - pleasant or otherwise - Emmen was inspired to create three bangles into which you can put an object, a photograph or a letter. Each of the armbands are the same shape but vary in the choice of materials from which they are crafted.

Rapid prototyping
New technologies have an unmistakable effect on the work of designers and since the inception of rapid prototyping it has had a profound effect not only on the possibilities of designs, but also in luxuriating ABS and HPS polymers. One designer who has used the technology to create a beautiful object is Wendy Legro, with her Morning Glory light. The lamp, which consists of solar panels, nylon thread, LEDs and a rapid prototyped formation, brings light into the home at night. During the day the flowers are closed and let the sun in through the window, absorbing the solar energy. When the sun goes down the flowers bloom and give out light. Such a product makes the transition between the inside and outside very natural and is a delicate balance between nature and technology. In a similar vein, inspired by nature and light, Christian Kocx's Flower 001 lamp opens and closes like a flower in response to the sun. Warmed by the heat of the light, the lamp opens and closes in response to its usage. Its delicacy and appeal comes from the ABS it is printed from, which is almost reminiscent of ivory.

String art
Threads and string art-inspired designs were in abundance during Dutch Design Week, either as part of designs or to curate exhibition space. WGSN - Creative Intelligence 25/11/2009 11:39 http://www.wgsn.com/members/ Page 9 of 9 One designer who used the technique as an informative as well as decorative part of her design was Alice Schwab. Her wall hanging, Living Graphics, showcases all the social connections that we make every day. Pegs connected into the wall allow users to disentangle one connection or thread from the other and to create an order based on emotional links such as your personal relationships and how often you come into contact. Her work is a visual expression of social networks, both in our real and virtual worlds. Also using thread to map out relationships is Guy Königstein. Mapping his family tree and his subsequent relationship with members such as his siblings and his father, Königstein has given each member a coloured reel of thread that literally weaves out a pattern as they move home, come together again and entwine during family conflicts and reconciliations. Recognising that the word 'knot' in hebrew is the same as 'relationship', Königstein adds an emotional level to his threaded loops and knots. Taking a completely different approach is designer Digna Kosse, whose minimal dress is more of a statement on the consumption of fashion than anything else. Paring back the dress to its barest form, she has used threads to highlight how a dress can be at its most skeletal, yet remain feminine and recognisable.

WGSN comment
What is clear about the work showcased at the graduation show itself and the surrounding shows that make up Dutch Design Week is the connection between design and the user. The designers don't focus purely on design itself, but the understanding of the relationship between man and product - and this is what makes the work unique and so inspiring.

Contact Design Academy Eindhoven Tel: +31 (40) 239 3939 info@designacademy.nl www.designacademy.nl © WGSN 2009

Nature vs Nurture: the Case for Synthetic Luxury, Luxury Society

26th November 2009

In the not too distant future, advancements in contemporary cutting-edge materials like “supernaturals”, bio-mimetics and hybrids may alter the course of luxury altogether.

But it is current research and development that have the potential to turn our conventional notion of luxury materials on its head. While bio-mimetics (technology mimicking nature’s biological systems) and material innovation have always gone hand in hand, material scientists have moved beyond merely emulating the properties of nature’s superior materials. By manipulating nature to make it outperform itself, “supernaturals” are evolving and exceeding the original attributes of many materials found in nature. Take for instance products like Fabrican (an instant, non-woven fabric applied from a spray-gun) or an artificial self-healing rubber created by researchers at Paris’s ESPCI industrial physics programme.

The Gucci Group has recently joined the growing number of luxury firms that recognise the importance of nurturing such new materials from ideas to prototype to the product stage. The Italian group announced last month that it is underwriting a PhD scholarship and research programme at London’s Central Saint Martins College as part of the Textile Futures Research Group (TFRG). Researchers will explore the potential of new technology, cutting-edge design, science and materials innovation as they relate to the future of manufacturing — that is, projects like those initiated by Suzanne Lee, the renowned fashion futurologist, designer and textiles researcher.

Lee, who is part of the TFRG, believes the luxury industry needs to find new ways to avoid being copied by mass-market competitors and that several of the materials coming out of these research labs may hold the solution.

“Luxury brands need to push boundaries,” she says. “And not just through design but they also need to look to things that cannot be mass produced and are ultimately out of the mass price range. Bio-materials offer a huge opportunity in this arena.”

Lee’s own research in bio-materials, super-synthetics comprised of a living structure, is called “BioCouture”. It explores the use of bacterial-cellulose in a laboratory to create clothes and accessories that grow themselves from a liquid in a “growth bath” — making it theoretically possible for the fabric to keep on expanding even after it has been used in a garment. A short dress, for instance, could keep growing over time and morph into new shapes. All be it far from ready for the consumer, such innovation in materials does open up a new way of thinking about co-design between consumer and brand, which is the truest form of customisation and multi-functionality. There is, furthermore, the “luxury” that brands could potentially offer by selling an endless catalogue of growth “recipes” for their garments to extend and decorate.

Another example of how scientists and engineers are striving to apply bio-mimetic principles to push the boundaries of luxury can be seen in an eleven by four-foot piece of cloth that took four years to produce, recently placed on display in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Simon Peers, an art historian and textile expert together with designer Nicholas Godley, harvested one million golden orb spiders in Madagascar in order to weave a textile entirely of extracted spider’s silk. Besides its extremely rare lustrous and tactile properties, the silk is ultra-durable and super lightweight, a “luxury” that would be most desirable in high-end garments for which wear and tear can mean the loss of a significant investment.

“Spider silk is very elastic, and it has a tensile strength that is incredibly strong compared to steel or Kevlar,” said Peers in a recent interview with Wired Science.


Peers and Godley built a scaled-up replica of a silk extraction machine designed in the 1890s by French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué who studied the spiders. Enlisting the help of dozens of handlers, the spiders were “milked” and released back into the wild.

The commercial viability of such an experiment is of course close to nil at present. But with research all over the world now being undertaken to replicate the spider’s silk, scientists are closer to being able to mass-produce such a fibre. The resulting fabric would be unmatched in the luxury fashion and textile industries.

Looking beyond bio-materials, “supernaturals” and the potential afforded by them, a new generation of super-synthetic plastics and ABS polymers are also altering our sense of luxury in the areas of packaging and product design.

Most notable among them are high gravity plastics, which many materials science observers have dubbed “plastics that exude value.” Commonly used for casino chips, these HGPs in some ways seem to contradict the principal advantages of plastics; and yet, their ability to be moulded into complex shapes together with the additional weight they carry help convey a sense of quality. The weight comes from either mineral or metal fillers, which can also give the plastic a darker and richer colour. Such material innovations are starting to become relevant for premium packaging for perfume bottles, like in the lid of Sisley’s Eau du Soir, as well as for golf clubs like Ping.

With the rise of more synthetic-natural material hybrids, supernaturals and bio- mimetic materials, in the future, consumers will undoubtedly have new standards for luxury. Soon, they may be entirely unable to discern the difference, for example, between a fabric genetically modified to behave and look like mink fur grown in a laboratory, and the genuine thing. So many questions will soon arise, leading us to reassess our definition of the luxury, premium and mass-market categories based on components and material composition. Will the time devoted to creating these new materials become part of the luxury moniker? Or will it be investment in the “recipe”? If the properties of synthetic materials of the near future surpass those of the finite luxury materials of yesteryear, will rarity as a factor of luxury cease to exist?

Food: A future Material

4th June 2009

It seems for a growing number of designers that food and the possibilities afforded by edible design is resulting in them embracing food and its tactile quality as a new design material.

Looking at how we engage with our food and how we respond to it in our day-to-day lives, designers are playing with its relevance beyond just for satisfaction and nutritional purposes.

As well as looking at new ways of eating and ingesting food, designers are also looking at food as a new material with which to design on both a physical and more emotive level as well as using it to create new forms of experience.

The Senses
With sensory design being a key trend offering up more than a visual experience, it was only a matter of time before designers began to reshape and redesign the way we think about food and its relationship with us rather than our relationship with it.

One such person is self-titled "eating designer" Marije Vogelzang, who questions what food means to a designer. Highlighting the fact that her designs "go inside your body. They feed you, they become a part of you…" and underpinned by societal trends towards food, she reassesses our opinion of food and our sensory responses to it.

Sharing Diner was a meal choreographed for Droog Design by Vogelzang. The experience incorporated plates cut in half so that diners had to pass plates around to complete a full meal. Vogelzang also suspended a tablecloth from the ceiling with holes cut out for diners' heads and arms - thus eliminating the view of each person so that any level of status, such as clothing, was hidden. Finally she adopted unusual eating utensils, further playing with the participants' perceptions and senses.

Clover Robin is another designer who is pushing the boundaries between food and the senses within her design experimentation - her work includes zips and light switches made from chocolate. By exploiting new and existing materials and processes, Robin tranforms familiar and well-known products and manipulates our perspectives and perceptions.

New Material
"Did you ever knit spaghetti or embroider lettuce leaves?" are questions asked by Marije Vogelzang in her book Eat Love. It's likely that the answer to such a question is mostly "no", but nevertheless designers are using food as a material with which to design.

At the Milan Furniture Fair Daniera ter Haar and Christoph Brach showcased their Raw Color project, an ongoing visual research project about vegetables and their colours. Their work takes vegetables and purifies them, transforming them into natural inks and using them in modern printing processes by filling inkjet printer cartridges to create a vegetable colour palette.

Another designer using food for colour and as a design material is Andere Monjo. Using water to evoke ideas of experimentation for others to be inspired by, she has collaborated with a chef and food stylist. Investigating innovative recipes, together they have captured the flow found in water through food design, resulting in an alternative experience in look, feel, taste and smell for a dessert. Using agar, a high protein seaweed, liquid chocolate and different types of colourful antioxidant berries, the results are both beautiful and nutritionally balanced.

Taking a more product-driven approach, designers are playing with food in a witty and playful way. Some are also working from a more responsible perspective and are on the look out for new eco and sustainable materials.

Greetje van Helmond creates products that appear valuable, yet are made from basic everyday materials such as sugar and flour, while offering up a new beauty in the rawness of their design. Her beautiful sugar jewellery and wall made from bread demonstrate beauty and tactility, as well as fitting into the debate about sustainability and the drive to find new materials with which to work.

Industrial design engineer Cheryl Lyn Bauer takes a different approach using the raw materials/ingredients to create a new material. Her "recipe", concoted in collaboration with a professor at London's Imperial College, has resulted in a new plastic made from everyday cooking ingredients such as cornflour, salt and oil. Her project, entitled Blanc, offers up a new material akin to a biodegradable plastic.

WGSN Comment

Posing questions such as what is food for a designer and what will the future of food be, these future thinkers, artists and designers are offering a fresh view on how we percieve food both from a future nutritional perspective as well as from a sustainability and design perspective. What it does begin to question is how will food exist in our near and far future and how will food, if at all, change our perceptions about our material choices, products and packaging.

© WGSN 2009

Senseware

30th April 2009

A firm favourite of the offerings at Milan Furniture Fair, the WGSN Materials team highlight the pleasure of the stimulating of the senses from an aesthetic and a technological level at the Tokyo Fiber 2009 Senseware exhibition.

Embracing the beauty to be found in the new generation of artificial or synthetic materials, Kenya Hara, exhibition director and poetic thinker/designer, once again inspires with his latest Senseware exhibition.Highlighting the shift in perceptions from a more natural world to an artificial one, we are taken on ajourney of surprise and delight with the visualisation of the uses of these new materials.

With the imagination to "visualise the possibility of a new field of creation and to showcase strange materials," Hara highlights how newly developed technological fabrics will become the "intelligent membrane of future design" on all surfaces we encounter, from furniture to walls to cars to grass. Drawing parallels with the Stone Age, when the use of tools stimulated human creativity, Hara sees these new materials as the trigger for a new sense and level of design for the future, taking into consideration issues of sustainability as well as technology and the revered Japanese aesthetic. "The Japanese aesthetic can be a filter to create more delicate and beautiful artificials that are nearer to human beings and skin - a second skin," Hara told WGSN.

Highlighting the beauty and delicacy of these new synthetics and collaborating with a cross-section of designers, manufacturers and architects, the resulting exhibition inspires and suggests that our synthetic future offers up endless possibilities.

Tokyo Fiber 2009 Senseware

To Be Someone, a collaboration between Asahi Kasei Fibers and Mint Designs resulted in a playful yet serious product made all the more poignant with the latest pandemic scare. Popular in Asia, protective face masks are common to protect from pollen and general cold and flu germs yet are surgical in their appearance.

When shown Smash, a non-woven polyester fabric with exceptional thermoplastic qualities, Mint Design came up with an air filter mask that would not only protect but would encourage a smile. A paper-like fabric is transformed through press forming into a 3D form , either that of a perfectly formed face or even a chimpanzee's mouth. As Smash it has a perfectly flat surface, Mint Design also experimented with a series of printed patterns.

Also inspired by the properties of Smash, product design group Nendo were delighted by the delicacy yet strength of the material and its appearance when light is shone through it. Nendo designed a series of lighting fixtures using a glass blowing technique by heating the material up and then blowing air into it to create the form. The resulting seamless one-piece lanterns are all one-offs and offer a variety of shapes and forms reminiscent of fungi.

Felibendy is a high-performance non-woven fabric that in its raw state is like a ball of cotton wool. Mouldable, it hardens when heated and it is ultra-lightweight and conformable as well as being somehow soft and hard at the same time. In the hands of fashion designer Kosuke Tsumura the material was transformed to offer protection in the form of a dress as well as crafted into a baby's cradle, highlighting the strength yet softness of the material. Inspired by the shared DNA between a mother and a baby, Tsumura created the dress from round pieces of fabrics that were linked together.

Breathtakingly beautiful, Breathair epitomises the principle of textiles as a second skin or living membrane. A cushioning material formed from highly elastic monofilaments, the fabric is 95% air and is formed into breathing mannequins. Inspired to create 3D human forms when first introduced to the material, artist Yasuhiro Suzuki experimented with welding and heat to form the humble cushioning material. The resulting beautiful mannequins are a far cry from the material's usual place as a filter, but highlights the beauty in these new "artificials".

Art director Kashiwa Sato took a very different approach to Breathair. Inspired by fact that it is essentially "visible air" he designed modular play equipment from laser-cut blocks of Breathair for children, allowing them to bounce, play and build.

The Moshi Moshi sofa, by designer architect Antonio Citterio, offers up new thoughts on how to sit. Starting as an oval, the sofa "morphs" its shape through hidden mechanics inside. The process is seamless due to the enhanced stretch offered up by the three-layer structure of the Finex fabric from Asahi Kasei Fibres. The triple-layered fabric uses a polyurethane elastic fibre (Roica) in the centre cloth to give a previously unobtainable stretchability in a fabric of this structure. Due to its unique properties the fabric is perfect for moulding as it doesn't fray or curl at the edges or show stretch or mould marks during or after the mechanical movement of the chair.

Also using a 3D knitted fabric, flower artist Makoto Azuma designed an internal garden of moss, highlighting the importance of living things being perceived as important whether perceived as beautiful, ugly, wonderful or ephemeral. Using Terramac from Unikika, Azuma has designed a circle of life for the moss in her installation. An eco-friendly 3D fabric made from polylactic acid, the material is biodegradable and in time returns to the earth. What is especially interesting about this material is that the carbon it contains has been captured from the air by the plants through photosynthesis and does not increase C02 emissions into the atmosphere as it biodegrades.

Taking the ideology that a car is an extension of the drivers personality Nissan and the Hara Design Institute designed a "car with a smile", the idea being that drivers could communicate with each other via a smile rather than the current negative horn. In order to make this possible they included a soft skin in the outer shell of Nissan's cube car. Roica, a second-skin fabric (also from Asahi Kasei Fibres), can stretch between 500% and 900% of its original size, offering it up for a wide range of uses beyond the conventional. It also has a balanced stretchability between the warp and weft directions making it a very stable fabric. Designed to bring some lighthearted design to the car industry, and is also a statement on the future of car design as the next generation of cars will not necessarily be designed solely by the car manufacturers of today.

Continuing with the playful theme, Panasonic have designed the Fukitorimushi, which literally means "wiping up creature". A small cleaning robot that wipes up the floor using its clever nanofibre second skin made from Nanofront, the world's first nano-level fibre. With a diameter of 700 nanometres it has unique properties such as slide resistance and a high fibre absorption and water retention rate. The resulting fabric, made from invisible nanofibres, has a superior surface area and therefore can clean up even the smallest of dust particles left behind by a vacuum cleaner. In addition the robot becomes a pet of the future with it's animal-like movement and friendly scrolling light interface.

With ultra-lightweight being a continuing theme within innovation and sustainabiltiy at the moment it is not surprising that two key materials showcased were carbon fibre-based. Inspired by the world's lightest and strongest structural material, architect Shigeru Ban set about designing a chair using Teijin's Tenax that would be so light that even a child would be able to pick it up with one finger. Jun Aoki played with gravity for his installation using Toray Industries' carbonised Torayca fibre. Both designs play with the unique properties of carbon fibre and embrace the unique aesthetic that it affords.

With any textile innovation, smart and responsive materials are not far away. Hiroo Iwata, a device artist, was inspired by the conductive fibre from Kuraray. Bringing the real and the virtual world together, he designed a series of robot tiles that enable you to really walk around in a virtual space. Using conductive fibres laid in different directions separated by an insulating fabric, a simple switch device is deployed by the user's bodyweight. Completing the circuit, the robots move in the opposite direction of the user, playing with our simple perceptions of where we think we are walking and where we are actually going. Using flower motifs representing Japan's seasons - primrose, pansy, wild chrysanthemem and peony, fashion brand Theatre Products designed a series of tablecloths that the viewers/users can inflate. The designs used a unique fabric from Toray which is an ultra-lightweight microfibre with a smooth handle and distinctive lustre, making it perfect for printing on. The unique construction of the fibre and resulting fabric mean that it is airtight without compromising on the delicate handle and drape of the fabric or requiring any coating to make it inflate.

Designers Gwenael Nicolas and Reiko Sudo's knitted bench takes to heart the thoughts of Kenya Hara: "It is the responsibility of designers to visualise the possibility of industry and for creative thinkers to imagine the next step of creation." Using fibre optics from Mitsubishi Rayon, the material exposes the object through movement. Sensors detect movement and results in a gradual glow of light along the length of the bench. A pairing of craftsmanship and technology, the knitted fibres produce a soft and sensorial light.

Industrial designer Ross Lovegrove brings the latest in weaving technology to the fore with his Seed of Love project. Using a triaxial woven fabric in which three yarn ends are woven at 60-degree angles rather than the traditional 90 degrees. The TWF loom uses very thin yarns in a 360-degree space with a resulting fabric that is lightweight, heavy duty and tear-resistant. Working with digital software the form is created by using a heat press process.

WGSN comment Not product, not fashion and not even not concepts per se, the exhibition offers up new aspects of creation with an emotional undercurrent that is very important. In the words of Kenya Hara: "senseware materials are those that the visualise the design of our generation."


Materials contacts
Smash Ashahi Kasei Fibres www.asahi-kasei.co.jp
Felibendy Kuraray www.kuraray.co.jp
Breathair Toyobo www.toyobo.co.jp
Finex Ashahi Kasei Fibers www.asahi-kasei.co.jp
TWF Sakase Adtech Tel: +81 776667121
Roica Ashahi Kasei Fibers www.asahi-kasei.co.jp
Terramac Unitika www.unitika.co.jp
Tenax Teijin Fibres www.teijin.co.jp
Torayca Soficar www.soficar-carbon.com
Nanofront Teijin Fibres www.teijin.co.jp
New conductive fibre Kuraray www.kuraray.co.jp
Eska Mitsubishi Rayon www.pofeska.com
Uts-Ultrafino Toray Industries www.toray.co.jp
Monert Unitika Sakai Ltd www.unitika.co.jp
Exhibition information
www.tokyofiber.com
© WGSN 2009