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Ep 3: Knitting Mathematics and Musical Textiles with Sophie Skach
277 Plays11 months ago
Whether you love or hate mathematics, you are going to enjoy listening to this episode.
In this interview, Sophie Skach, a fashion designer and researcher, discusses her passion for interweaving the world of textiles with mathematics and technology, and her unique approach to creating catwalk collections and PhD research projects. She shares her journey on how she uses textiles as a medium to demystify mathematics and communicate complex mathematical concepts through her textile and fashion pieces.
Dive into Sophie’s world to learn about mathematical fashion and uncover the complex yet whimsical projects she shares with us. Get behind the scene insights about projects such as “No Input Textiles” (where textiles are used as musical interfaces), “Talking Jumpers” and “Whistling Jacket”.
Sophie explains the human-centric computing approach she adopted during her PhD, through the creation of sensor-equipped garments, and the relationship between fashion and social computing.
She challenges us, the listener, to embrace curiosity in a cross-disciplinary approach to design and learning. Listen in and find out how her curiosity about a mathematician, who shared the same birthday as her, influenced and shaped her career.
Resources:
Sixty Symbols: videos
Connect with Mili Tharakan:
https://instagram.com/noordinarycloth/
Connect with Sophie Skach:
Website: www.sophieskach.com
Youtube videos of No Input Textiles and other works
Instagram: @SophieSkach
Twitter: @SophieSkach
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wPQ5wvwAAAAJ
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Sophie Skach
00:00:04
Speaker
Hi everyone and thank you for joining me on another episode of No Ordinary Cloth Podcast. My name is Millie and today we're going to be speaking with Sophie Skach, a fascinating fashion and e-textile designer and researcher based here in London.
Innovative Fashion Projects
00:00:19
Speaker
Her breadth of work combines everything from fashion, textiles, mathematics, computer science and humour.
00:00:26
Speaker
to create textile musical instruments, jumpers that talk, jackets that whistle. She's even made fashion collections as an ode to dead mathematicians and trousers that can decode what your buttocks muscles are saying about you. So definitely stick around to hear more about all of these projects and I think you all agree that what she makes is definitely no ordinary
Interdisciplinary Approach
00:00:48
Speaker
clock.
00:00:48
Speaker
Let's dive right in and hear from Sophie about her approach to combining different disciplines, her philosophies towards design, research and the demystification of complex topics such as mathematics through fashion.
00:01:04
Speaker
Welcome Sophie to this podcast, No Ordinary Cloth. It's such a pleasure to have you with us today. And I'm really excited because you do some really lovely, fun and playful textiles that I think, you know, people don't really usually associate with textiles and fashion. So I'm really curious to sort of dive in and share about where you get these ideas from and how you brought this
00:01:28
Speaker
world of textiles and technology and mathematics together. So thank you for your time. And before we jump into all the amazing body of work that you have, I'd love to just get to know you a bit, Sophie. First of all, if you could just share with us where you're from, where you grew up.
Journey to London
00:01:45
Speaker
First of all, thank you so much for inviting me. It's great to be here. I was born in Vienna and was raised there as well. Then about 12 years ago, I moved to London, so now I'm based in London. What brought you to London? Initially, my master degree. I was looking to specialize further into fashion, what was before
00:02:06
Speaker
what I was doing in Vienna already. And I was interested in menswear and there were not many places where you could specialize in menswear tailoring and London was one of the places. So I ended up going there and then I somehow stayed there. I guess that's what happens in London. Yeah, I know. It brings everyone together here, isn't it? It's such a vibrant community.
Creative Influences
00:02:25
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about life in Vienna growing up as a young teenager. What sort of music did you listen to or your hobby? My hobby was always writing and storytelling. So from a very young age onwards, I wanted to write and I did everything because of that. So I think also my approach to design in the end was because I really wanted to write stories.
00:02:49
Speaker
Actually, that really comes through in the names of your project as well. I think you've got some really fun names and I was thinking, yeah, and I can see that connection. Yeah, it's important for me to kind of have a coherent story in my designs as well. And I only started drawing and from drawing, I started designing because as a small kid, I couldn't write yet. I either dictated my mom to write down what I said, or I was drawing all the stories.
00:03:16
Speaker
Nice. I had piles of paper of drawings that would replace my writing. Amazing. So that's kind of my approach to my creative work, I think. That's how it started. And then I was interested in creative processes and design from an early age on in general, because both of my parents have creative professions. So I was confronted with that from the very start. Could I ask what they were doing?
00:03:41
Speaker
So my mom is a teacher for fashion design. She was at the school where I ended up going to fashion school. And my dad was a creative director and photographer in an advertising company.
00:03:56
Speaker
to find out if you have any sort of garments or fabric that holds any special memories for you. It doesn't have to be something that you made but I think textiles are really powerful and I wanted to sort of see if there's a deeper connection that you have that is special for you.
00:04:12
Speaker
I was thinking about this question and I was thinking of whether I have one piece that is like the most special textile piece for me, but I don't think I do. I think it changes over time and I see these like personal connections as a very dynamic thing. I remember very special clothes from when I was a child. I remember special pieces of items, you know, in different phases of my life and they were and they are still very special to me.
00:04:42
Speaker
but they relate to that very time. So in that sense, these material connections I think we have, they relate a lot to memory and kind of narratives and stories again. I think I also learned that when I do and then something happens to that, my heart is broken. I need to have multiple items that are dear to me. In my practice now, it's more the relationship to the structure and the making itself.
00:05:05
Speaker
So now certain materials are very dear to me, certain structures I really enjoy working with. Could I ask you to share one of those memories that you have connected to maybe some textiles from your childhood?
Personal Textile Connections
00:05:20
Speaker
I mean, there's some cardigans. When I was very little, my mum used to go to Paris to attend the fashion weeks.
00:05:26
Speaker
because she was working in that industry. And she always would bring back a piece of something for me, either chocolate or a piece of garment or an accessory. Mostly it was something textile. So there were a few of these, mostly I think of cardigans, knitted cardigans with nice kind of embroidery on them that are very precious for me. And I still have them. So I still sometimes wear my children's cardigans because she bought them large so that I would have them for a long time. And I was drowning in them back then.
00:05:56
Speaker
And now they're kind of tight fitted, but I still have them and I still wear them. Oh, that's amazing Sophie, that is so beautiful. And then fast forwarding to now, I love that you said your relationship is more in the structure of the garment or the knit.
00:06:12
Speaker
Can you explain a bit of that? I think this change of relationship to textile surfaces relates to also my practice because before I was designing clothes, I was designing patterns, shapes, kind of whole collections that refer to a more kind of overall or umbrella story. And now I engage more in structure. So at the moment, I'm really into crocheting because I know that there's no machine for crocheting and I accept doing it by hand.
00:06:42
Speaker
Whereas with knitting, I'm, I come more from a machine knitting background. I learned how to use knitting machines from when I was 14 and I've worked as a knitwear designer and kind of a knitwear consultant for, for companies for machine knitting. So I was always like, oh, why should I do this by hand? Oh my God, two needs. That's so complicated.
00:07:03
Speaker
With crocheting I kind of accept that because there is no machine for it and at the moment I just enjoy exploring what I can do with a single thread in terms of what haptic structures I can create with that. I am always very fascinated to think that these are all techniques that have been developed thousands of years ago and they're so complex.
00:07:23
Speaker
Being weaving something, or knitting something, or crocheting something, or even felting is something that has developed very early on, like before pattern cutting was a thing, and clothes were treated so preciously that no one dared to cut into them until the 11th century. Before it was weaving, I think it's the oldest textile technique, and even this process of making
00:07:48
Speaker
a threat from some kind of natural material. I find fascinating and I'm stunned that this happened so early on before other tools and other technology was invented. So it seems to be a very fundamental human
00:08:06
Speaker
And then it was treated as something so precious that, yeah, I mean, pattern cutting only evolved in Europe in the 11th century. Before that, the clothes were woven and kind of, or knitted into shapes, or they were worn as the cloth that they wear. Oh, I love how you talk about textile, Sophie. I can see how passionate you are about it and really how embedded you are in making, making fabric.
00:08:34
Speaker
Were there any teachers or maybe your parents, mentors, philosophers, anyone that's really inspired you and influenced your journey through fashion? Yes, definitely.
Inspirations and Influences
00:08:46
Speaker
I mean, in terms of the creative practices and the approach to design, my mother was always a very big influence because she worked as a designer. So before she was a fashion design teacher, she worked as a fashion designer for Jean-Paul Gaultier in Paris.
00:09:02
Speaker
So she knows that world really well, and she could always give me really good advice. She always, well, not always, but often had the last word on my design. Wow, what do you think about this? Should I do the collar like this? Or do you think design creators should turn along? And she was like, she always had a very clear answer, and I learned a lot from that. And she had this generosity towards design also that I took on. So in terms of the processes,
00:09:29
Speaker
It's definitely my mother who influenced me most. And later on, when I was already living in London, my approach to making concepts for collections and working more in depth for my own, back then it was menswear collections. I always had a bigger interest in menswear than women's wear.
00:09:51
Speaker
And then I was very influenced and inspired also by 17th century mathematicians. Tell me more. I think I started to become interested in mathematics in particular, when I actually started fashion school because I attended some public lectures on it was some Einstein anniversary years or something like that. And I listened as this teenager who just came out of her punk phase and dying her hair green and
00:10:20
Speaker
stuff like this. I was like, oh, wow, there's these 17th century or like even earlier, like 15th century mathematicians who kind of revolutionized everything and who also sometimes just made up some concepts that are now the fundamental of everything we do. And I was so fascinated by that, that I thought I need to dive deeper into this. This is why eventually I ended up studying mathematics.
00:10:44
Speaker
because I was so inspired by their exploratory approach and by their clear arguing and logic, but at the same time very empirical work. And that's something I wanted to translate into design processes.
00:11:00
Speaker
Their work is probably the reason why I approached my collections in the way that I did. I always based everything I designed on research. My design was always very research heavy, which is also then why my course director at the time in my master degree suggested I look into doing a PhD. And that's what I did in the end. Wow, that's some big influence there.
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's big names, like I was particularly drawn to one mathematician who is actually known as a philosopher more, and that's René Descartes. And I mean, it started with a very childish connection because he shares my birthday. And I was like, Oh, who is this person?
00:11:38
Speaker
that was when I was like 13, and was attending one of these public lectures. And he's such a controversial figure in science, and he delivered such fundamental work, both in philosophy and mathematics, that I just got obsessed with him. And my first collection was an ode to Van Oetika. And I kind of took it from there.
00:12:01
Speaker
Yeah. Well, we're definitely going to dive into more of that connection later on in the podcast, but you have such a big breadth of body of work. So I've really had to kind of pick two or three that we can talk about here, but starting with the no input textiles project that you've done more recently. So I came across that at the textile intersection conference here in London in September. I had so much fun playing with that instrument that you've made. And I mean, I don't play any instruments. Me neither.
00:12:30
Speaker
Now I play textiles. It was such an accessible instrument for anyone to
No Input Textiles Collaboration
00:12:35
Speaker
start playing with. I know it might be a bit confusing for listeners to understand what this is without seeing it, but I'd love for you to explain what that project is. So the No Input Textiles, that's a collaboration with Victor Shepperson from the Intelligent Instruments Lab in Iceland, where I spent a few months as a researcher
00:12:53
Speaker
exploring the relationship between textiles and artificial intelligence and other musical interfaces. So I would ask the question of can textiles be an instrument and what happens to instrument design when suddenly they're not when instruments are not rigid and hard but soft and flexible and kind of you know adapt the properties of textiles.
00:13:15
Speaker
So it's the no input textiles. So there's two elements to it. There's pieces of textiles. So fabrics that I made, there's different textile structures that are presented. So there's a, it's almost like a mat of knitted fabric and also woven fabric as well as.
00:13:32
Speaker
crocheted piece of fabric that is then connected via textile cables to a mixer. And the no-input mixer is a particular type of mixing desk that works and creates sounds with its own feedback loops. So it's a very kind of nerdy instrument.
00:13:50
Speaker
There's not many people, I think, who engage in it. And my colleague Victor is one of them who enjoys playing with the narrow input mixer. On the mixer, there's a lot of knobs and sliders that you can play with to affect the signal and to kind of see if you change these parameters, what happens to the output, the sound that you can create. And putting the textiles into that circuit or into that loop adds another new dimension of
00:14:18
Speaker
of what sounds you can create and it gives you a more tactile idea of what you're doing because by turning or sliding these knobs and bars on the interface on the mixing desk it's about fine tuning and it's always the same gesture. You always turn or press or slide and with the textile you can do a larger
00:14:41
Speaker
kind of range of gestures. You can squeeze them, you can press them, you can just stroke them, you can try and rip them apart. They're not that sensitive, so it's very hard to break them unless you take a pair of scissors and cut into them.
00:14:56
Speaker
So they, they give you a more direct idea of what you're doing with the signals. I really, really enjoyed that, just stretching the fabric and touching it, stroking it, you know, because if I saw just a mixer sitting there, I'd never dare to touch it. Cause I'm like, I have no idea what these knobs are and what they do and what I'm doing to this machine, but the textiles just made it so approachable for anyone. And, and like you said, it was so playful that it invited anyone to kind of come in, make sounds and make music with it.
00:15:23
Speaker
I think that's a big advantage that textiles have. So during my PhD when working with my supervisor Becky Stewart, who is now at Imperial, we also held a few workshops on that particular topic to use textiles as a medium to engage a different audience and to kind of take away that barrier that often people have towards technology or electronics or anything.
00:15:51
Speaker
We held workshops where it was targeted towards especially women and textile practitioners to then engage with electronics. And textiles are like a good bridge to that. So now the listeners must be wondering how stretching fabrics is going to make any difference to a mixer. What is special about these textiles and how did you make them?
00:16:11
Speaker
True. I did it, so it's not just a piece of knit or just a piece of woven cloth. This is made with a yarn that I actually spun myself when I was in Iceland during that research visit. And so the mats of fabric that I used in this installation is wool and also conductive yarn. In this particular case, a resistive yarn that's made from stainless steel.
00:16:35
Speaker
And that's kind of the whole magic behind it. So when we talk about smart textiles or intelligent textiles, I'm always a bit skeptical with the use of that word because the textile itself as such without context is not intelligent. It's not smart. The yarn itself, the fact that I use metal coating on the yarn is not
00:16:52
Speaker
intelligent but it has the potential to be intelligent and by using this resistive stainless steel yarn when knitting the fabric and when weaving the fabric that was used for the no input textiles that allowed me to send signal through that and to
00:17:07
Speaker
sent current through this piece of fabric. So the fabric itself, the entire piece of cloth, conducts electricity. And by interfering with that signal, with my hands, I change the signal. So I affect the resistance of the entire piece. And by doing that, the output is affected. That's how all these weird sounds come together then that make like, whoo. That piece of fabric is connected to the mixer.
00:17:35
Speaker
Yes, so there are then also fabric cables that you can connect and buy soldering and so there's a mix of very traditional like textile techniques and very well electronic techniques that come together here. So you can make textile cables by also using conductive yarn but then not resistive one but like highly conductive one.
00:17:56
Speaker
like copper, silver, gold, if you're fancy. We used copper and silver. And then you can solder that to the plugins of the mixer, like inputs you have. So you can plug the textile directly into that plastic rigid in place of the mixer.
00:18:12
Speaker
What were some of your learnings from this project? I found it very interesting to see how people with different backgrounds interact with the textiles.
Workshops and Interactions
00:18:22
Speaker
So it went from being very careful with it, not daring to even lift the fabrics up, to really squeezing them and making a whole bunch of chaos out of it.
00:18:34
Speaker
And what I discovered was that time is, of course, a factor. So the more people interact with it, the more adventurous they get. And I think that's a very natural progression that you see with every other instrument as well. But sometimes people don't accept that progression. So they try it for one minute and then they say, oh, it doesn't work the way I want.
00:18:55
Speaker
I'll leave it. Whereas then I would ask them, would you say the same with a guitar? Like if you try a guitar for a first time and you don't get the tune that you want to out of it after five minutes, would you leave it forever or would you try and learn it? So there's also this aspect of virtuosity to textiles in that sense.
00:19:15
Speaker
And often I think that's not in our consciousness because textiles are such a familiar material and we're surrounded by it all the time that we don't apply that complexity to textiles so that it can take time to learn and understand these textiles as well. Lovely. I know you hosted some workshops in Iceland as well to encourage people to make these kinds of textile instruments. Could you tell us a bit about that? Who attended? What was their experience like?
00:19:41
Speaker
Yeah, so there one of the last workshops I was holding in Iceland was for a charity called Girls Rock. So it's a charity that enables young girls and also I think now more generally marginalized groups of people to engage in music making and learning how to play instruments and so on.
00:20:00
Speaker
So it was for them that I introduced textiles as a potential musical interface. And it was a nice get together because it always has that character of just a craft afternoon, because it is a lot about craft. Through that, actually, you then can learn to understand some basics of electronics. So something that can appear very theoretical and
00:20:23
Speaker
Maybe not that doesn't always is presented in a very approachable way. Through making and kind of using your hands with it, you kind of embody that knowledge. And that, yeah, so these workshops and in general, the workshops I give often is for beginners of textile practitioners.
00:20:39
Speaker
people that are, you know, maybe hobby knitters or so, but that never thought about anything else above, like beyond that application. And then when I tell them, oh, if you just put a bit of conductive yarn alongside your Icelandic wool, then, you know, maybe your scarf can make a sound or
00:20:56
Speaker
it can light up an LED or very simple things. And then even when there's other people in the audience like engineers or computer scientists, because I've given the same workshops to computer scientists, and they know a lot about electronics and these theories. And they're still baffled by the fact that some soft kind of thing can suddenly light up an LED, even though that's the most basic example. But it's so interesting that they start to think outside of their box.
00:21:25
Speaker
I've hosted a few of these workshops and you can see the moment when that sort of switch flips in their brain and they're like, oh my goodness. You know, if it's someone who's been knitting for 50 years and suddenly that very craft is able to do something much more than they've imagined. I think just doing that workshop, it just opens up a whole new world. And I know after that, whether you're around or not, they'll go and explore and learn and, you know, figure it out themselves.
00:21:51
Speaker
How about generating ideas? I like it when then once they kind of accepted this seemingly magical thing that something that looks and feels like their clothing can do other things, then keep them warm or anything. Then they go on to see, oh, what could I do with it? And often children have really funny and great ideas.
00:22:14
Speaker
And I think that's how the craft itself evolves, isn't it? Whether that's craft such as knitting or crochet, but also, you know, the engineering programming is a craft itself. They start rethinking about what they're doing and how that relates to a physical world that they're trying to, to also create.
00:22:31
Speaker
Yeah, and often the textile technology is very closely linked to programming and the invention of computers as such with examples like Ada Lovelace. So it's not that far off to connect these two and to use one to understand the other. It's almost like we've come a full circle, isn't it? And now we can sort of run in parallel. Yeah.
Merging Fashion and Mathematics
00:22:52
Speaker
You've mentioned earlier that you specialized in fashion, especially menswear and knitwear technology, but you also studied mathematics and found a way to combine these two sort of seemingly different worlds. And you refer to this as mathematical fashion. Could you explain to us what this means and how you bring these skills from these two different worlds into your work and how it influences your design?
00:23:15
Speaker
In general, it was all driven by my curiosity and it all starts with intuition rather than a well thought through and planned concept. So I was doing fashion, I was learning how to program knitwear as a fashion student, as a teenager, and I became interested in mathematics and I was like, oh, so how could I combine the two and how do they maybe inform each other and benefit each other?
00:23:39
Speaker
I was then always in touch with a professor in Vienna who was very polite and in the beginning with this like crazy girl with green hair who was, I'm a fashion designer, I want to know more about mathematics. He was like, okay, whatever. But he was very kind to me and always kind of took time after his lectures to explain concepts to me and kind of encourage me actually to do what I do.
00:24:03
Speaker
And then I thought, oh, how would I design a collection of jumpers for him? How would a jumper for a mathematician look like? To embody maybe their work, to somehow not only visualize, but embody concepts of their mathematical work. And that's how it started.
00:24:21
Speaker
And then the more I was exploring this connection, the more I was keen on, first of all, demystifying mathematics, because I was between these worlds and I saw the reactions of people when I told them, when I told scientists that I did fashion.
00:24:38
Speaker
like, Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah, I'm knitting as well. And ah, so what do you think about my t shirt? And when I told creative people that I studied mathematics, everyone was very kind of anxious almost or they were like, Oh, I don't understand anything of this. Like, I better not like press anything in this regard. And I was annoyed by that because it's not both elements or both disciplines can be complex.
00:25:02
Speaker
And also, there's no need to depict mathematics as some sort of black magic. It is very complex, but that has to do with our education system, I guess, and how we are taught to approach these disciplines that we have that, I don't know, that there's some sort of hierarchy in sciences. It's acceptable to not know anything about math and to also not want to talk about it. But it's not really acceptable to say, oh, fashion is too complex for me. Everyone has an opinion about clothes.
00:25:29
Speaker
And that's because we're so familiar with it and in touch with fabrics all the time. But also the implications of mathematics is what determines our daily life and the fact that also we can talk now via screen and that the audio is recorded and so on. It's based on what maths can do.
00:25:46
Speaker
So I wanted to tackle that and I wanted to demystify it and kind of see that whether I can use fashion or textiles as a medium to understand mathematics for myself, but then also for others, and to find another way to integrate mathematics into creative processes without simply visualizing these concepts.
00:26:07
Speaker
I know that there's a lot of artists integrating maths or kind of geometrical structures into the work, but I wanted to go beyond this. I didn't want to simply visualize some geometry. I wanted to integrate it in different ways. So for example, I designed knit structures based on mathematical
00:26:26
Speaker
principles, I tried to prove a mathematical theorem by a performative aspect, by models appearing together on the catwalk, wearing outfits that relate to each other and by appearing together they would prove a theorem. That was a show in Tokyo.
00:26:45
Speaker
And so I tried different approaches and I really enjoyed that. And I also, I think I understood mathematics a bit better through that as well. So I thought, oh, maybe that's a way to go and to, yeah, to also show a different aspect of how mathematics can be beautiful or creative. How fascinating. You should be going around and teaching maths in school, honestly.
00:27:10
Speaker
Because I mean, I've, yeah, with textiles and through fashion, because I've known so many lovely, really smart young girls who want to do fashion as their career. They're, you know, sort of about 12, 13, 14 year olds. And they all say the same thing. I want to do fashion, but I don't like science and I don't want to study any more science. I just want to talk about design.
00:27:29
Speaker
And it really breaks my heart when people say that because there's so much power when these different disciplines come together, what you're able to achieve is so much more innovative, creative, complex, layered. Yeah. We need more people like you out there in schools. I mean, I think it takes a lot of courage to, to step out of the convention. Also for me, like when I studied mathematics, I was like, I didn't know anxiety until then. I was like physically.
00:27:56
Speaker
And fashion was always within my comfort zone because I grew up with that. So I combined this very alien world with something that was like my safety zone. It's absolutely so brave to do that, to even want to sign up to a course and think, I want to figure this out.
00:28:13
Speaker
I was lucky to start at that in Austria, because in Austria you can just enroll at a university. There's no tuition fees and there's no admission tests for most subjects, so I could just enroll in mathematics. It's not as siloed as it is here at universities.
00:28:30
Speaker
No. Wow, that's brilliant. I studied mathematics and fashion at the same time. I was enrolled in two universities and I, the first year focused more on mathematics, just becoming a bit more humble with what this is. And, and then I, because of some projects and opportunities in fashion, I eventually kind of focused more on fashion again. And I mean, mathematics, I, the people I studied with, they all understood it as a tool more or less. So they studied it. You become experts.
00:28:59
Speaker
for the financial sector or for, you know, to become physicists also. So very applied ways. And I was often baffled by very simple, like abstract descriptions, like something like this is true for n dimensions, but it is not true for infinite dimensions. And I was like, what? Oh my God, the law of nature change when there's infinite dimensions and mathematicians think about infinity all the time. That's crazy.
00:29:28
Speaker
or just different kind of sets of numbers where suddenly one and one can become zero and stuff like this. So for mathematicians, very basic, simple things. And I think that's why it took me so long to to come to terms with mathematics because I stopped like when others were just reading through it and they were like, Oh, yeah, okay, these are the condition theorem, fine, I'll work with it. I was like, what?
00:29:50
Speaker
infinite dimensions? Oh my god, curved spaces? What? And I just spent a lot of time thinking about that and then also thinking about how I can translate that into creative processes. So I was thinking of what happens if, I don't know, I was at some point I was interested in topology. Oh, how could I translate these rules of topology into designing a garment? What does it do to garment design when I follow rules of topology?
00:30:16
Speaker
I love your curiosity, Sophie. I mean, I think that's the core essence of you. You know, even if it's scary, you kind of want to dive in. Yeah. I mean, sometimes I, when I suddenly, also with my PhD that was done in a computer science department, I had no background in computer science whatsoever, but I was curious and I was really interested in pursuing that one rather than a purely fashion oriented.
00:30:40
Speaker
So I just did it and somehow they accepted me. They were very open and I was very happy. But then once I was in it, I was like, what the fuck was I thinking? Why am I here? Am I insane? But yeah, I seem to have these moments of being brave and just kind of then ending up in situations that cause anxiety. I mean, you're definitely not afraid, I can tell you that.
00:31:01
Speaker
So let's talk more about your PhD. Social computing was one of the areas that you narrowed down on your PhD combined with e-textiles. Can you explain both these terminologies? It might be quite new to a lot of people. What is social computing and e-textiles?
00:31:16
Speaker
I think I'll start with a bit of a context of my PhD.
PhD Focus on Social Computing
00:31:20
Speaker
So I was doing my PhD at Queen Mary University as part of the Media and Arts Technology program. So the program was designed to bring together different disciplines and to marry art and science in different ways. So I was very interested in that. And with my fashion and a tiny bit of mathematics background, I applied without any, you know,
00:31:41
Speaker
expectations because it was within a computer science department and they were very open for me to bring in the skills that I had that are very complimentary to the skills that you find in a computer science department. Then my supervisors and I was very lucky to work with the people I've worked with. They were very open for me to explore how my skills fit into computer science.
00:32:04
Speaker
And one of these areas that I explored was social sciences and how I can use process of designing a garment to how I can use that to explore aspects of human behavior. I mean, that sounds very abstract still, but I was researching towards wearable technology. That's probably what people have heard of.
00:32:26
Speaker
even things like your smartwatch, Google glasses and stuff like that, that's wearable technology. And when you take these devices and rethink the materiality of it, that's kind of where I come in and where I was then questioning, oh, does it have to be plastic? What about if it's textiles? And, you know, all these devices that measure movement, that measure heart rate, that, you know, all of these kind of physiological signals, do I need this to be plastic or can also maybe these conductive yarns and these
00:32:55
Speaker
textile materials that I can turn into a sensor, can they replace these other more rigid materials? So that's how I started my PhD in regards to exploring textiles as a material for human-centric computing. So social computing or human-centric computing, that means that it puts the human in the center of the research. So it designs computing interfaces or sensors or actuators
00:33:22
Speaker
for the human, so that somewhere in the process, the human interacts with that or the technology collects information about that human for the human's good. That's kind of how I would describe social computing. So I was part of the cognitive science research group during my PhD. I was working with Pat Healy, who's the head of the group and the psychologist, but I was also working with Becky Stewart, who comes from an audio engineering background and has engaged in e-textiles for a long time.
00:33:51
Speaker
And so for my work, that combination was really beneficial because I had support on all the technical details that I struggled with because I didn't do computer science before. I knew about textiles and I did all the crash courses on basic electronics and programming, which I think by now is also far more accessible to young people than it was a few years ago. And it's far more embedded also in the curriculum, I think.
00:34:18
Speaker
now. But when I was younger, that wasn't the case, I'm not that old. So I learned this from scratch. And Becky helped me a lot to understand that to kind of, you know, she was someone I could talk through this. And then with these developments, I then kind of went to to the cognitive science department and exploring how I can then use that development. So the fact that I can make a sensor from textiles, what can I do with it? And I was interested in exploring social interaction. So that's why I was then
00:34:47
Speaker
placed in a cognitive science or why I joined the cognitive science group because I found it interesting to see how that idea of clothing or fashion we often talk about affects our behavior, how that makes us feel, what we choose to wear.
00:35:04
Speaker
and why, etc. So something I have to think about as a designer anyway, working in fashion industry, I now wanted to explore from a different perspective. So not to just design clothes in order for people to pick them and express themselves in their way, but to use the clothes to understand that aspect of people. So to understand how people maybe feel and how they behave. So using the clothes as a measurement tool in
Research on Social Behavior and Posture
00:35:33
Speaker
a way.
00:35:33
Speaker
So the core bit of my PhD was the development of a pair of trousers with integrated pressure sensors. So a matrix of pressure sensors, it was a matrix around the thigh and the buttocks, and it had a grid of 10 by 10. So it was 100 small pressure sensors per leg. Made out of e-textiles.
00:35:53
Speaker
made out of stretchy knitted fabric that is coated with silver and another fabric that's coated with carbon that was resistive. So it's a mix of very conductive fabric and resistive fabrics that allows me to use the whole fabric as a pressure sensor, which is what I did because I was interested in seeing to whether the postural movement of people give me information about their social behavior.
00:36:19
Speaker
So to imagine that, like overall questions I asked in my research was, can the trousers tell if someone is speaking? Can your clothes pick up whether you're laughing or whether you're very passive in a conversation? And I developed these pressure sensors that are embedded into trousers. So here my skills as a pattern cutter, as a garment designer came into use and my freshly acquired skills as an e-textile person back in the days.
00:36:47
Speaker
They were combined together with the overall context that I was working in to understand human behavior. So I made these garments. It started with chair covers, actually. So I was looking at different textile surfaces and realized we're in touch with textiles all the time, not just via garments, but also on chair covers and in the UK, particularly on floors like carpets.
00:37:09
Speaker
So, and if I can make senses from these textiles without using any other material than textiles, can I use that fact that we are so much in touch with this material? So that's how I came to design these interfaces and these sensing systems.
00:37:27
Speaker
So the trousers that looked and felt like maybe a bit like leggings, they were stretchy. That was mostly because I wanted to accommodate a lot of garment sizes because then I went on to look for people to try them on and see if they actually do what I wanted them to do. So a lot of people tried on these trousers. I made a few trousers. It was a little mass production of sensing trousers.
00:37:49
Speaker
And then I asked people to take on certain postures. And during this movement, the data of the pressure sensors was collected in the trousers. So if you imagine a seated conversation, for example, the fact if you cross a leg, if you kind of key up a little bit more, if you slouch back, that affects
00:38:09
Speaker
how much pressure you apply with your body on the seating surface. And that I can measure with a simple pressure sensor that is made from textiles. So that's what I did. So there was no audio recorded, there was only video recorded as a kind of ground truth to see if the sensors kind of do anything dodgy. And then I looked into this sensor data to see, okay, are there any patterns in that data that reveal the
00:38:34
Speaker
posture of the person wearing these trousers, and if so, then how far can I take this? If the pressure sensors detect the posture, can I from the posture, so we're talking about body language here, then can the posture then reveal what effect, what social state, what conversational behavior
00:38:53
Speaker
I employ. So therefore can this like textile pressure sensor tell me if someone is speaking or not? Or can the trousers tell that? And it turned out they can. And the surprising thing that I like to use as an academic icebreaker all the time is that the relevant sensor area
00:39:10
Speaker
to distinguish speakers from listeners was the buttocks. So when we sit and have like seated conversations with people, when we talk, we apply slightly less pressure in our buttock than when we listen. So almost as if we key up a little bit, it was subtle enough for the camera not to pick it up. It's not like an overt keying up or kind of changing posture, but there's this micromovement or this like muscular movement that happens.
00:39:36
Speaker
when we prepare to speak and when we then kind of take a more passive role again within an interaction that is read by these textile sensors because the trousers are right next to our skin and they're in between like this pressure we apply from our body onto the seating surface and
00:39:55
Speaker
Yeah, vice versa. Listeners applied more pressure on the bottle and less pressure on the thighs, so as if they kind of slouched back a little bit. That's why my scientific papers, my very first scientific publication is called Talking Through Your Ass.
00:40:11
Speaker
I know you have a YouTube video called the same. I'm sure it got quite a few times. Usually when people talk about e-textiles and integrating senses on the body, it's to measure things like how the muscle's performing and therefore it's used for sports or medical kind of
00:40:29
Speaker
applications. Exactly. It's often very egocentric and I just wanted to see if we can use it also in a non-egocentric and a social way because textiles are such the way we use it when they're not smart is also very social. What a great project. I mean, just even to get that insight about listeners versus speakers, a pair of trousers is going to tell us all that.
00:40:54
Speaker
It was very much to the joy of my supervisors that we could use the word arse. Yeah, I know, in an academic paper. Good job working that in. That's my achievement. So you talked about your fashion skills, your e-textile skills, you had to learn a bit of programming, data analysis.
00:41:14
Speaker
How did you learn all this? Or maybe the better question is, I know you mentioned you sort of did a crash course in all of it, but how does someone go about just learning some basics? So for eTextiles, there's now
00:41:30
Speaker
a large collection of wonderful books, for example by Sarah Catley or Elizabeth Ryan or Sabine Simo, that present different projects and give a bit of a context, also of the history of smart textiles and its materials. But then for a more hands-on
00:41:48
Speaker
like tutorial type of thing or archive of knowledge, I always refer to Cobacant. So that's the website of two practitioners and designers and researchers now based in Berlin, Hannah Panner-Wilson and Mika Sotomay. And they are pioneers in the entire field. So everyone refers to them and they have everything they do open source and they document everything really well.
00:42:11
Speaker
So that's always a good go-to place to see what materials are there, what types of projects have people done with these materials, what senses can you make from textiles, and also understand that that's an ongoing conversation. That's not like a closed theory to say, okay, textiles do this and you can do exactly this and nothing else with them, because
00:42:33
Speaker
Also, Mika and Hannah, they explore that all the time further. They find new ways to turn textiles into something that is interactive or smart in that way. Actually, next month's episode is an interview with Mika. Mika and Hannah are just a world of knowledge in e-textiles and what they've done for the community is incredible.
00:42:55
Speaker
Yeah, and it's also a nice approach that they keep everything open source and that that's their goal also to keep the community open because that's something I found very interesting to compare between the fashion world and then the engineering computer science world. In fashion, a lot of these techniques and a lot of that knowledge is very secretive.
00:43:16
Speaker
No one would reveal where they get the fabrics from, how they develop their pattern, where their manufacturers and production sites are. It's all very competitive and therefore very secretive. Whereas in computer science and in engineering, everyone shares everything. And I found that a very nice idea. When I started my PhD and someone would share their code with me, I was like, are you sure? It's very precious. Are you sure you really want to
00:43:43
Speaker
give me this piece of code that you have written and I'm allowed to kind of, you know, use bits of it. They were like, yeah, of course, here's my GitHub. And in fashion, like once I asked friends about like designers also, if they could share their details or context from their like production side and manufacturer. And it was like a very big thing to do that, you know, how to give and that you share knowledge.
00:44:07
Speaker
in this world. I didn't realize that about these two sectors. Yeah, and I think fashion is huge. I mean, that's something that now having worked in both of these worlds, I think would benefit fashion as well. If there's more sharing of resources that would make the whole sector more sustainable and so on. So there's two projects. Maybe you just want to talk about it very briefly.
00:44:29
Speaker
whistling jacket and jumpers that talk. It's the names that get me really curious about this. If you want to just quickly share about these projects and hopefully through that we can also see what your creative process might look like because you told us about storytelling and how you translate that into your collection or your work. Maybe through one or two of these projects you can share what your creative process looks like. I'll start with the talking bus. That's a project called Text and Isles.
00:44:57
Speaker
It was a collaboration with a poet based in Vienna, Nati Ki Leiber. She used to be a photographer and always shoot my collections. Then she changed career and became a writer. I continued in fashion and I changed from being a fashion designer to doing e-textiles. The talking jumpers, that was to connect with my writing passion a bit more again, because we thought about how we could
00:45:26
Speaker
create poetry from these textile properties. So we wrote poems that are based on these textile knitted properties of like a thread and the interlocking of threads. There can be a lot of poetry about that. So I designed the jumpers and she wrote the poems alongside each other. So both were influenced by each other.
00:45:52
Speaker
And then there was this pair of jumpers, one blue and one yellow, and two poems that would relate to these jumpers and the knitted structures that are used in the jumpers. We also wanted to give, so that was a commission for an exhibition, an art and fashion festival.
00:46:11
Speaker
in Vienna that then traveled. Eventually we exhibited it at Ars Electronico as well and that was an interactive installation. So it was this pair of jumpers that was on mannequins and people could touch them and interact with them and the idea was that by touching the jumpers
00:46:30
Speaker
they would evoke these lines of poetry. So there were a few areas knitted into the jumper that were made with conductive yarn, but it was invisible from the outside. So it was kind of not obvious where these sensing areas were. And then people
00:46:46
Speaker
interacting with them and touching the jumpers, they would explore where these lines of the poem would appear. So it was via a loudspeaker or sometimes headphones that people could listen to that. And the jumpers started talking to each other because the poems were written in a dialogue and two people interacting with these jumpers
00:47:07
Speaker
touching the jumpers in the right areas, like on the shoulder or on the arm or on the back, there were six areas per jumper that triggered a line of the poem being read. And that created a dialogue between the visitor and the jumper, but also between the jumpers with each other. So yeah, that was like the story of the talking jumpers.
00:47:29
Speaker
Yeah. Nice. And the whistling jacket? The whistling jacket, that was a very quick project in the first year of my PhD. That was about dressed, getting dressed. So that was about layering of garments that I designed and made that each of them had an identification tag in them.
00:47:52
Speaker
So that works with radio frequency. So it's like our bank card or oyster card or anything that you kind of hold it to a reader and then one device transmits and one device receives these signals. And that's what was integrated in the garments. And each garment or each of these identification tags had a sound to it. One was whistling, one was
00:48:16
Speaker
I don't know, I think a piano one was so different instruments were allocated to different garments and different tunes and I collaborated with a friend who's a jazz musician who designed these tunes and then you could also similar to the poem you could kind of curate your tune by putting the garments on in different combinations. So the layering of the garment would determine which
00:48:40
Speaker
which instrument was added to the whole outfit in a way. So when being dressed all together, the whole outfit, it would be the full song or the full piece. But when only the shed was worn, it was only the, I don't know, the piano and the jacket was the whistling. So on top of everything, then the jacket would whistle along the team. I love
00:49:01
Speaker
That is so whimsical because usually when you talk about music, people have layered instruments and all of that, but just that whistling element of it, it just makes it so whimsical and playful. And I love that you added that layer because the rest of the music sounded at least, you know, it seems more serious. And then you just experience the whistling ads that human. I like a humorous aspect. Yeah, that definitely comes through a lot of your projects, Sophie. I love that.
00:49:29
Speaker
So I like to integrate a bit of humor. That's why I was also very happy to be able to use the word ass and talk about butt pressure in my PhD. Good job on that. We talked about absolutely interesting e-textile research work that you've done. But when we talk about e-textiles industry and where these kinds of ideas that you're playing with, where can that go and translate into the real world?
00:49:55
Speaker
into the hands of users and consumers beyond research.
Future of E-Textiles
00:49:59
Speaker
What do you see as the future of these kinds of textiles in the next five years? I think that some of the ideas that people have in mind are too far-fetched. Many people talk about, I know there's reports of e-textiles or smart textiles or wearables in general being the fastest growing market. That's all true and the development of e-textiles is very rapid and there's a lot of suggested applications.
00:50:24
Speaker
but we're not quite there yet. So I think talking about it, that e-textiles are in our everyday life in five years time, I think is too far fetched. If we talk 20 years, I would find that more realistic. There's some applications that derive from e-textiles research that are already in use in medical sectors or in sports as well, like insoles that measure the pressure of your food, therefore being able to see how well you kind of
00:50:50
Speaker
stand in the shoe or on a certain ground, there's wearables that can be inserted to garments. That I would always distinguish from e-textiles because the point about e-textiles is to replace plastic things or more rigid things. But the things that are on the market already are more and they're sometimes sold as smart textiles as well. Things that you can insert like the Google Jacquard jacket or there's some yoga pants where you can insert
00:51:19
Speaker
electronics into the garment. So it's like a little pocket that enables that. With the Google Jacquard jacket that was very popular and one of the kind of go-to references of what smart axles can do in a kind of lifestyle sector because there's a lot in medical applications and also aerospace like
00:51:37
Speaker
the health monitoring of astronauts and stuff like that. But in the lifestyle sector, this Google denim jacket, for those who don't know, it's a denim jacket. It was a collaboration with Levi's and they integrated conductive yarn in the cuff of the sleeve that could act as a capacitive touch interface. So a similar sensing mode that is in your smartphone, like touch. So that was the conductive yarn that was then connected to like in the button, there was a little
00:52:06
Speaker
like microcontroller that was still plastic and still rigid but with that you could then control your phone so you could mute your phone by tapping your sleeve and stuff like this so there's more explorations in that area i think that will become more accessible also but i mean something the textiles allow to do is once these technologies
00:52:28
Speaker
are in our everyday life that we don't notice them. It's very ubiquitous. And that's already happening in the car industry, that the fabric of car seats is equipped with sensors that measure your posture and that can measure whether you're tired and then maybe give the car signal to stop or slow down or whatever. So there's a lot like this. So when it comes to the fact that it is ubiquitous in our life, I don't think it will be something that we notice maybe.
00:52:56
Speaker
I'm glad you brought up the project, Google Checkout. A lot of smart textiles examples that you see out in the world tends to be driven by the tech companies or engineering companies and less by the fashion sector. Do you feel that way? And why might that be?
00:53:12
Speaker
I think it has to do with how these sectors are perceived by society a little bit, because again, talking about maths and tech, that's something very mysterious and that not many people feel kind of, I don't know, confident enough to talk about. Whereas all this DIY craft community, that's something very accessible.
00:53:30
Speaker
And also it's historically a more female domain than technology is. So there's a lot of issues that come into play explaining this phenomenon. But I go to fashion fairs like Premier Vision. It's like the largest fabric fair for the textile industry. And there's all these side events and conferences that discuss these issues and discuss sustainability and discuss potential applications of smart textiles.
00:53:58
Speaker
And what I always see is that there's a third component that I think we need in order to make a successful smart textile or wearable product that can work on a broader market. And that's the social science component and the people who know about interaction design and know how humans behave.
00:54:17
Speaker
there are a lot of amazing designers, there's a lot of great technologists, but then they come together and say like, hmm, what could we do? Maybe address with like moving butterflies, or that's a project I think Microsoft did, or a bra that measures stress that, you know, but I feel like where's the social scientist that says, yes, this is what people need, and this is the kind of core of human behavior and the thing together with so that triad of people can make a successful
00:54:46
Speaker
I'd like to leave some resources for our listeners to go and find out more. We've given examples of e-textiles, but what if someone wants to learn a bit more about mathematics? Is there a book that you'd recommend, someone who really is new to it and just wants to dip their fingers, what is a book or a YouTube channel or someone that they can go and check up on?
00:55:06
Speaker
So something that was important for me or that caught my attention when I was younger was a lot of these pop science events and pop science books, like history of science, or some kind of weird examples of things that are collected as stories in a book. There's a lot of those.
00:55:27
Speaker
And also a YouTube channel that I really liked. It's from a research group in Nottingham that's called 60 Symbols. It's more about physics, but it's kind of these nerds of the Physics Institute explaining very complex topics in a very approachable way. So that's what I liked and that's how
00:55:48
Speaker
you know, then you can always dig deeper. And I don't know, even though like pop science has a bit of a negative connotation, but I kind of like it. And I mean, that's how I entered this world. All these like, I don't know, public lectures when there's some sort of anniversary of some scientists. There's a documentary from Simon Singh about a fair mass last theorem. That was actually the foundation of one of my collections then in the end.
00:56:14
Speaker
where he describes in a very kind of exciting way that captures your attention how a certain mathematical theorem was proven. It tells a lot of stories of mathematical interesting things.
00:56:30
Speaker
Yeah, amazing. I love that. I'm so curious now to kind of dig into some of the information that you gave here. I know I've asked a lot of questions, but is there any question that you wish I'd asked? I mean, one question I like thinking about is, which mathematician would you like to design a collection for?
00:56:48
Speaker
And so if I could, I would design a collection for Everest Galois, a young French mathematician in the late 18th, early 19th century, who was very revolutionary in mathematics and died very young because he was very passionate about politics and love.
00:57:05
Speaker
So he's like, I like all these bio peaks of mathematicians and then that's kind of how my story started and what affects my design. So I did a collection for René Descartes, I did a collection, who else, for Tucho Brahe, a Danish astronomer. So there's a few more scientists I would like to design for.
00:57:23
Speaker
I also give my collections to colleagues when they present at a conference. They wear my shirts or suits. Amazing. Sophie, thank you so much for your time. It's been such a fascinating journey with you. Thank you so much. I feel like I want to come and visit you sometime to see your collection of jumpers, which has so many stories, but also with concepts of maths integrated into another collection.
00:57:48
Speaker
I mean, now I think I'll go and design some collections again. I feel like that's what I want to do now, hoping about this. I'm glad, I'm glad. I mean, what a pleasure, Sophie. Thank you again for your time. You took us all the way from Rene Descartes or through the world of maths, into fashion, took us to Iceland, all sorts of places, through your body of work, and especially with e-textiles, incredible work that you're creating in this field.
00:58:17
Speaker
I love that you're inspiring people to engage with e-textiles and bringing widely different communities such as electronics, computing, textiles, mathematics, fashion together into one space where they all exist very happily together. Yeah, and my aim is to demystify things. I love that. No magic.
00:58:37
Speaker
Actually, I want to ask you one more question. I love that you want to demystify these things. If there were some very young people listening to this podcast, which I know they are, what would your advice be to them to kind of go out and embrace something new and something different? Just be curious, I think. I mean, it's so easy to say that and it takes so much courage actually to be curious.
00:58:59
Speaker
But I think it pays off, and I think challenging your approaches to things is sometimes beneficial. Because I often see that women are often more careful in trying out something new, and they're far more cautious than men. I've seen that in mathematics. Men try something out, they break it, and they break it, they try it again. So what?
00:59:20
Speaker
And women think about it a lot and are like, oh, what if I break it? What am I going to do? I better not try in the first place. And I know that from myself as well. And it's very hard to overcome that, but I think that's the way forward. What a wonderful note to end in curiosity. Thank you again, Sophie, for your time. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was a great discussion and a great conversation. Now I have so many more thoughts. Oh, I love that. And you've inspired me so much sharing your story as well. Thank you very much. Thank you.
00:59:49
Speaker
I hope you're feeling as inspired and energized as I am after listening to Sophie. One can clearly sense her passion for textiles and her curiosity for the world around her is absolutely contagious. No one has ever made maths sound so exciting that I want to go learn more about René Descartes' physics and astronomy right now. I've put links below to some of the resources she mentioned so do check that out.
01:00:16
Speaker
I hope you'll take our advice and be curious. Move out of your comfort zone. I encourage you all to go out and learn something new today. Even break something or pull something apart and learn from it. Send me a message on Instagram and tell me what you've learned.
01:00:31
Speaker
I know it's hard to visualize some of these projects as Sophie's talking about them, so please don't forget to check out the No Ordinary Cloth Instagram page for more about no input textiles, talking jumpers, and some of her other projects. You can find Sophie's social media and website details in the show notes as well, so please do connect with her. Thanks again for joining us. It would be fabulous if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave a comment. I love to hear from you.
01:00:58
Speaker
Share the podcast link widely with everyone, even your old school maths teacher. I'm sure they'll enjoy this episode. Bye for now. This is your host, Millie Tharakin.