POSE: Phase I: Cultivating an Ecosystem for Interdisciplinary Smart Textiles Research

Smart textiles provide technological solutions to pressing social problems, especially in domains of healthcare, robotics, and sustainable design. This project is the foundational stages of building an open-source ecosystem that will address and extend the impact of smart textiles by making complex woven structures accessible and understandable to engineering audiences. At the same time, the project will open channels to make engineering practices understandable to weavers, broadening participation and opportunities for grassroots innovation. Such an ecosystem can make positive impacts upon smart textiles research as well as the textile industry of which woven textiles alone account for 47% of the global textile market. This approach to ecosystem development is to transition an existing open-source tool, AdaCAD, to a thriving ecosystem of users and contributors. AdaCAD has been designed and developed in close collaboration with weavers and engineers to address specific difficulties of smart textiles design. AdaCAD overcomes difficulties by applying advances in computer-aided design (CAD) within the domain of textiles design. Specifically, it uses parametric design to provide a standardized and interactive form of documentation that can be shared and extended among diverse researchers. AdaCAD currently supports roughly 100 registered users. This project includes fundamental planning activities that will enable the growth of AdaCAD into an ecosystem with distributed contributors and users. The research team will (1) systematically trace and engage in outreach to smart textiles research teams exploring weaving; (2) pilot a program of monthly virtual AdaCAD study groups focused on onboarding users and transitioning users to contributors; and (3) host a 3-day “governance workshop” that convenes open-source experts from communities of craft and creative code to formulate plans and evaluation metrics measuring the health of the ecosystem. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.