The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
The Rollup Interface is a conceptual interactive textile that we designed as part of the UHCI (Universal Home Control Interface) project. It explores the possibilities to use textile design and textile interaction in combination to create a new and foreign interactive object.
We started to explore the textile interaction of rolling up a piece of fabric with a simple assembled prototype. The prototype has one broad strip of very conductive fabric on one side and two strips of less conductive fabric on the other. Once the cloth is rolled up, the broad fabric from one side acts as a contact between the two narrow stripes. The decreasing distance between the two contacts can be measured as an analog value by the attached micro controller. In another iteration, we designed a weaving pattern for a multi-layered fabric that corresponds to the assembled version. A middle layer separates the two outer layers with a very conductive copper thread on one side and a less conductive silver-plated polymer thread on the other.