Shanel Wu

• PhD Student at University of Colorado Boulder

In this studio, we will explore sustainable tangible interfaces by making a range of biomaterials that are bio-based and readily biodegradable. Building off of previous TEI studios that were centered around one specific biomaterial (i.e., bioplastics at TEI’22 and microbial cellulose at TEI’23), this studio will provide participants the ability to...

Motivated by the growing use and incorporation of bio-based materials in textiles and wearables, we explore one of these materials' quality, dissolving, as an intentional affordance to design ephemeral wearables for fashion. We developed techniques to make biofoam strings, resembling yarns, and used them to weave, crochet, or knit three wearables:...

What would happen if we designed CAD systems like a weaver designs cloth? Drawing from our ongoing collaborations with weavers, we suggest four rules to bring these qualities to your own practice: follow the materials, privilege the present and personal, form kinships with the past, and design systems of notations.

Each new material developed opens a broader pallet of aesthetic and functional possibilities for designers. This paper introduces DIS to biofoam, a material that is water-soluble, biodegradable, and can be made conductive. We describe the material in detail: the process of making the material from scratch, the material’s fabrication into forms with...

Woven smart textiles are useful in creating flexible electronics because they integrate circuitry into the structure of the fabric itself. However, there do not yet exist tools that support the specific needs of smart textiles weavers. This paper describes the process and development of AdaCAD, an application for composing smart textile weave draft...