HCC: Lowering Barriers to Reproducibility for Woven Textile Technologies

The craft technique of weaving is increasingly used in engineering research because of its ability to combine multiple materials into complex forms that are soft, pliable, and/or customizable. For example, weaving is used to make biomedical devices, aerospace materials, and wearable technologies, to name only a few. One of the main challenges in integrating weaving into engineering domains is the difficulty in reproducing a design with a high degree of quality. This is because the design workflows and manufacturing systems used for weaving are highly varied, making it difficult for a complex woven design to be effectively communicated across production sites. These barriers to reproducibility are slowing innovation because they make it difficult, if not impossible, to share designs for the purposes of collaboration, external validation, or scaling a prototype to a product. This project will address these barriers by generating a design format and interface for designers to specify functional requirements of a woven textile technology in a format that does not depend on a particular weaving machine configuration. Our goal for this format is to enable researchers to adapt a given design to their local equipment in a semi-automated fashion. In doing so, we aim to enable faster and more robust advances in weaving techniques that support engineering needs. Ultimately, these advances could improve the quality and functionality of devices that require weaving across a broad range of scientific domains. The process of realizing a format for reproducible weaving addresses research themes in novel weaving structures, human-machine collaboration, and collaborative design innovation. Our project will begin with a survey to classifying the most used techniques and equipment for bringing technical function to woven forms. Drawing on our own experience in weaving, and in collaboration with weaving experts, we will develop design and production approaches for the most common techniques and test them for their ability to transfer across different semi-automated and fully-automated weaving machinery. The best performing techniques will be encoded as parameterized functions in an open-source code library and made accessible via a drag-and-drop design interface. Additionally, and in recognition that creating these complex woven forms still requires significant hand-work by humans, we will develop and test different forms of interactive guidance in terms of how well they support production and finishing phases of a woven prototype. Our findings about interactive guidance will be integrated with our interface so that the machine design files, and the human guides, are created in tandem from a given project description. Our entire workflow will be robustly tested through a design research study, whereby several different research teams who use weaving will both design a novel woven textile technology, and recreate a design created by another team. We see this project as having high potential for impact because the systems we will build will make it easier for researchers to integrate weaving and to share their designs across multiple settings. Through the process of making those systems, we will produce novel insights about the state of the art in weaving for engineering applications; methods for interactively guiding fabrication activities that involve humans and machines; and emerging opportunities for collaborative innovation in the domain of weaving. 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.