Solar Cells Can Now Be Printed on Anything, Even Paper and Fabric

 

Bike lights powered by your clothes? Phones charging in your pockets?

Researchers at MIT have figured out how to print photovoltaic cells on every-day materials like paper or fabric — and the process is practically the same is printing this article out on your desk printer.MIT reports that a team of researchers has published a new paper in the journal Advanced Materials detailing how solar cells can be printed as easily and as cheaply as “printing a photo on your inkjet” thanks to new special inks.

via Solar Cells Can Now Be Printed on Anything, Even Paper and Fabric : TreeHugger.

Suffrage Banners Online

Banner by Mary Lowndes, 1908

A unique collection relating to British women’s fight for the vote 100 years ago has been revealed online through the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS).

The digitised material represents a selection of the vast collections housed at the Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University, and includes posters, photographs, postcards, badges, and other memorabilia relating to the British suffrage movement.

Crowd attacking suffragettes

Particularly remarkable and moving items from the online collection include a photograph of a crowd attacking suffragettes, and the purse that was held by Emily Wilding Davison at the Epsom Derby in 1913, when she stepped in front of the horse of King George V, which resulted in her death four days later.

The Women’s Library is the oldest and largest collection of women’s history in the UK and was founded in 1926 as the Library of the London Society for Women’s Service, a non-militant organisation led by leading suffragist, Millicent Fawcett. It is now held by the London Metropolitan University and is an internationally acclaimed specialist library, archive, and museum with collections that have broadened since its inception to include a wide range of subjects which focus on the lives of women in Britain. The collection now consists of 60,000 books and pamphlets, 3500 periodical titles, over 450 archives, and 5000 museum objects.

The collection of valuable documents, from the Women’s Library and the Parliamentary Archives, which tell the story of the women’s suffrage movement has also recently been selected as one of twenty collections to represent the outstanding heritage of the United Kingdom on the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register.

The online selection provides a taster of these extensive collections, and adds to the national repository of over 120,000 digitised images available through VADS from a range of collections across the UK. In particular, this latest addition complements the existing online collection of Women’s Library Suffrage Banners, which includes almost 250 banners and associated artworks which have been made available online for free use in education and research.

To view the new Women’s Library Suffrage Collection, see:
http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/WLS

To view the Women’s Library Suffrage Banners, see:
http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/FSB

The sound of Fabric

 

 

An interesting experiment – turning textiles into audio speakers:

Sometimes people ask me if there is a way to replace headphones with smart textiles, sound coming out of a hood or from the fabric around the shoulder areas, near the ears.What at first seems impossible is actually feasible with a bit of eTextile magic. Hannah, one of the most innovative personalities in the wearable technology space, published on her newly created Kit-of-no-Parts wearable tech website a possible way how to make sound with Fabric speakers.

 

 

Read the full story at The sound of Fabric

Two sites worth subscribing to if you’re interested in wearable technology are talk2myshirt and kit-of-no-parts.

“Textile” – the journal of cloth and culture

Those interested in textile design from a research and cultural perspective might want tocheck out this journal dedicated to the subject:

Textile brings together research in textile studies in an innovative and distinctive academic forum for all those who share a multifaceted view of textiles within an expanded field. Peer-reviewed and in full-color throughout, it represents a dynamic and wide-ranging set of critical practices, it provides a platform for points of departure between art and craft; gender and identity; cloth, body and architecture; labour and technology; techno-design and practice – all situated within the broader contexts of material and visual culture.

You can download a sample issue to check it out. A personal subscription is £49 for the year (3 issues) or you can access via the library.

Shaping Sustainable Fashion

A new book has just been released which might appeal to those interested in sustainable design, and sustainable fashion and textiles in particular.

According to the book’s blurb:

The production, use and eventual disposal of most clothing is environmentally damaging, and many fashion and textile designers are becoming keen to employ more sustainable strategies in their work. This book provides a practical guide to the ways in which designers are creating fashion with less waste and greater durability.

Based on the results of extensive research into lifecycle approaches to sustainable fashion, the book is divided into four sections:

- Source explores the motivations for the selection of materials for fashion garments and suggests that garments can be made from materials that also assist in the management of textile waste.

- Make discusses the differing approaches to the design and manufacture of sustainable fashion garments that can also provide the opportunity for waste control and minimization.

- Use explores schemes that encourage the consumer to engage in slow fashion consumption.

- Last examines alternative solutions to the predictable fate of most garments – landfill.

Illustrated throughout with case studies of best practice from international designers and fashion labels and written in a practical, accessible style, this is a must-have guide for fashion and textile designers and students in their areas.

Buy it from Amazon.co.uk – we’ve also asked the DJCAD library to get a copy.

Textiles research: Gravity suit mimics Earth’s pull for astronauts

 

 

The BBC is reporting on some research in the field of textiles that promises to help astronauts adjust to life back on Earth:

A stretchy suit that mimics the effects of the Earth’s gravity has been developed in the US to spare astronauts the ill effects of long missions of weightlessness.

Returning astronauts have lower bone density and muscle mass and can even suffer separation of their vertebrae.

The suit is made of a fabric with carefully tailored stretchiness.

It creates more of a pull at its wearer’s feet than at the shoulders, replicating gravity’s pull on Earth.

via BBC News – Gravity suit mimics Earth’s pull for astronauts.

Textile ‘DNA’ thwarts designer counterfeits

 

 

MSNBC report on a new technology to help crack down on fake textile-based goods.

Glued-on labels and misspelled brand names were once dead giveaways to exposing counterfeit designer goods, but high-end counterfeiters have become far more sophisticated. Today, it can be far more difficult to distinguish designer products from their counterfeit cousins using visual inspection alone.

German textile manufacturer Schoeller Technologies has invented a new technology to help keep counterfeit goods off the street. A secret chemical is used to create a unique DNA-like signature called DNAtex that can be instantly verified using a handheld scanner.

Read the rest

Studio space and screen prints

DJCAD level 2 textiles student, Judy Scott, shows us around her studio space and some of her printing experiments.

Studio space and screen prints, posted with vodpod