What will happen to artisanal techniques in the future and what kind of impacts will new technologies have on crafts? There are no certain answers to these questions and to the ever-present dilemma about crafts and technology, but, there have been designers and researchers who are trying to find ways to combine these two arts, among them there's also Yuchen Zhang.
A lecturer, designer and educator interested in the world of wearables (she co-founded the Wearable Media Studio), Yuchen Zhang started experimenting a while back with traditional techniques.
In 2018, together with artist and Parsons MFA textile graduate Jeremey Ripley, she devised a way to make tufted surfaces using a needle punch pen and a combination of highly conductive sewing threads and nonconductive threads.
The former are used to build sensors and by using them, designers may be able to integrate e-textile sensors into furniture, fashion designs, carpets and interior design pieces. Touch, pressure and gesture could trigger the sensing input.
While early tests done in 2018 with a multimeter showed that electricity flowed through the piece when the conductive thread was pressed (depending from the pile heights and the circuit diagrams employed) this technique needs to be refined, but the applications could be interesting from carpeting to sense foot traffic patterns and motion or integration into wearable pieces to interface with smart devices.
One of Yuchen Zhang's most recent projects relates to an interior colour changing heating panel: the textile on top of the panel is painted with thermochromic pigments that allow the fabric to change colour going from dark cherry to pink.
The designer added the pleated pattern to give volume to the panel that, by heating, creates more nuanced colour variations depending from the folds. You can follow the instructions in the YouTube video at the end of this post to make the panel or you can maybe use the video as starting point to develop an entirely new project.
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