Fourteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Despite almost universal participation in textile use, the understanding of the fundamentals of textile construction within the global north appears to be increasingly superficial. The typical person is largely unexposed to the making process of textiles and textile products, as production is outsourced to locations distant from the final user. In recent years, fashion and textile designers have attempted to engage users in their making processes and origins through the use of various supporting media. Brief and curated ‘haptic’ videos of work being made are commonly exhibited through social media channels, and advertising copy is increasingly engaged with construction details such as maker, origin, technique and materiality. The intention of my research is not to disregard the production of this additional media, but to propose a turn to utilising the textile itself as the site for further user engagement. In this paper I reflect on a collection of weaving experiments used in a series of interviews conducted in Perth, Australia – my place of residence, and Dhaka, Bangladesh – a major producer of textile products for export to the global north. Applying practices and theories in architectural tectonics and a gothic ontology, I seek to determine the characteristics of cloth that may a) increase user engagement and b) allude to the event of its making through amplifying the poetics of construction. The hypothesis here is that employing a tectonic methodology provides woven cloth, as a carrier of fundamental properties, with the capacity to narrate its own story.