Optical Textiles

Optical Textiles, or ‘illusory material’, is a revolutionary new technique for product design unencumbered by the limitations of the status quo. It predicts opportunities in material creation for product designers and agencies using multi-material 3D printing. Material creation does not have to be separate from the design process and the material itself does not have to be a single layer or separate entity that only exists uniformly on an object’s surface. Imagine designing everyday products with seemingly impossible materials that only exist in the digital world; a future where designers can manipulate the colour, texture, and refractivity of materials across time and different viewing angles. Imagine the future of colour creation that is not based on layers of chemical paints, but a combination of 3D-printed optical lenses and simple colour blocks. Imagine a physical material that displays dynamically without electronics, an invisible object that is informative or a hard object that feels soft. For years, 3D printing has played an important role in product development, design prototyping, customisation and rapid production. In most cases, it gives designers a preview of their design (how they will look and feel) before mass production. Recent research have also explored production applications in highly customised products such as shoes and clothes which cannot be mass-produced. Optical Textiles opens up new opportunities in multi-material 3D printing by freeing printing capability to create materials with unique expressions that cannot be done using other manufacturing processes or workflows. It brings freedom to create 3D digital materials in the physical world. Optical Textiles breaks away from surface limitations in object and industrial design by adding another dimension to the material interface. By embedding information into three-dimensional matter (voxel), this ‘illusory material’ creates new material organisation that responds directly to user intervention and the environment. With multi-material 3D printing, a future is possible in product development where the design of surface detail, texture and refractivity can be merged with the overall product composition. With voxel printing capability, designed and tested material interfaces with depth and explored volumetric behaviour that is both visually and functionally meaningful to the user. By assigning different material properties to each voxel in multi-material printing, designers can create object interfaces with various material distributions that can display unique material expressions. ‘Illusory material’ may just represent tomorrow’s state-of-the-art materials. The project undertaken at MIT was advised by Professor Axel Kilian and Professor Stefanie Mueller. Red Dot Award: Design Concept | Concept | 3D Printed