It’s difficult to remain uncreative and ininspired in our times as we are literally bombarded with stimuli and ideas. Quite often the best inspirations for people working in fashion and interior design come from more technological and scientific sources. The Geometric Computing Laboratory at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, or EPFL) is for example a great place where you may find not just ideas, but maybe even collaborators to develop experimental textiles, materials and collections.
The laboratory site features a wide variety of projects, publications, essays and reseaches that will open your mind and make you fall in love with geometry and maths (even if you dreaded them while you were in school...) and with computer graphics and digital geometry processing.
One of the latest papers (don't be discouraged by the technical language, read about the overall concept and think how it can inspire you to collaborate with computer scientists) posted on the site refers to Bistable Auxetic Surface Structures.
This is actually a development of previous researches on deployable material systems based on optimized bistable auxetic cells. A few years ago researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and at the EPFL published the first results of their researches on auxetic materials.
This term refers to solid materials with negative Poisson ratio, that is a flat flexible material that can stretch uniformly and expand up to a certain extent. It is simple to grasp why this would be a desirable solution - a flat material that can produce doubly-curved surfaces (such as a sphere) is indeed attractive for fabrication.
Previous experiments along these lines made in 2016 focused on producing a variety of items, including a pair high-heeled shoes, a top and a lamp. The teams involved created 2D auxetic materials - sheet metal, plastic, or leather - in the form of a triangular linkage which exhibited auxetic behavior at the macro scale.
The flat kinematic linkage, composed of identical equilateral triangles, deformed into a curved shape, forming spatially-varying hexagonal openings resulting into a complex target 3D surface (think of Haresh Lalvani's sculptures built using sheets perforated with patterns made by a computer-controlled laser cutter that allows it to be stretched into a 3D object, to get an idea of this process).
The shoes developed for one of these researches featured an auxetic upper fabricated from a single piece of metallic material using an interactive rationalization method based on conformal geometry and global, non-linear optimization, and a 3D printed sole.
In this case, as in the case of the top based on a 3-D digital model, a computational tool determined the pattern of slits necessary to make the sheet conform to the desired shape. The pattern was then transferred to a laser cutter to begin the fabrication process.
The auxetic material of the top was laser cut from a nearly inextensible leather textile and stretched to conform to the doubly-curved mannequin body.
The latest Bistable Auxetic Surface Structures project regards a novel deployable material system based on optimized bistable auxetic cells. As explained on the Geometric Laboratory site, such a structure can be flat-fabricated from elastic sheet material, then deployed towards a desired double-curved target shape by activating the bistable mechanism of its component cells.
The team used a computational solution for the inverse design of the structure, an algorithm that first precomputes a library of bistable auxetic cells to cover a range of in-plane expansion/contraction ratios, while maximizing the bistability and stiffness of the cell to ensure deployment. They then used metric distortion analysis of the target surface to compute the planar fabrication state as a composition of cells that best matched the desired deployment deformation. As each cell expands or contracts during deployment, metric frustration forces the surface towards its target equilibrium state.
It is clear that linkage-based auxetic designs can provide exciting ideas for the future. What sort of products could be created with this technique? Well, origami-style folding techniques have always helped science, technology and fashion as well: first and foremost these new researches into auxetic designs could be applied to surgical textiles such as cardiac stents and vascular implants and grafts, but auxetic materials are also intended to be used in extreme environments such as outer space or the deep sea.
In fashion they could be used to create more personalized fashion designs or maybe employed to develop dynamic sportswear pieces for athletes, but it would be intriguing to see if they could be employed to develop also post-surgery and rehabilitation apparel or even underwear. The more you look at the Bistable Auxetic Surface Structures, the more you wonder if something as light and practical as this may be used indeed to design innovative mastectomy bras.
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