Self-Cleaning Textiles
Inspiration Award at TEI’21 Student Design Challenge
Authors: Fiona Bell, Alice Hong, Andreea Danielescu, Aditi Maheshwari, Ben Greenspan, Hiroshi Ishii, Laura Devendorf, and Mirela Alistar
This project explores how photocatalytic nanoparticles and light can be leveraged to clean (i.e., remove stains and kill bacteria) textiles. This project is a collaboration between the Living Matter Lab, Unstable Design Lab and Accenture Labs. Accenture Labs has continued to partially fund the project, which has been published in CHI'21 and received the Inspiration Award at TEI'21. While a functional self-cleaning textile that can be applied to public spaces is the end goal, this work currently focuses on how "destaining" and "undyeing" can be used as intentional design tools that can selectively degrade the color of organic stains on textiles.
CHI’21
We introduce “destaining” as an interactive component for the HCI community. While staining happens unintentionally (e.g., spilling coffee), destaining can be used as an intentional design tool that selectively degrades stains on textiles. We explore the design space using silver doped titanium dioxide (TiO2/Ag), stains, and light as a set of design primitives for interactive systems. Through our replicable and accessible fabrication methods, we showcase how HCI researchers and designers can upgrade various fabrics to self-destaining textiles, that can destain using both external and embedded lights.
Over the course of 36 hours of light exposure, a piece of white cotton stained with coffee returns to its original color.
We passively control destaining to pattern textiles by overlaying laser cut stencils and exposing the textile to external lights.
We digitally control destaining patterns by embedding Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) within double woven textiles.
TEI’21
The Undyeing Swatch builds off of the design space presented in our CHI’21 paper by more deeply exploring how LEDs can be embedded within textiles to provide uniform, digital destaining. As such, this swatch explores “undyeing” as a design process that utilizes light and dye as materials for controlled interaction. The swatch itself consists of cotton yarn knitted into an I-cord that is coated with TiO2/Ag and dyed with hibiscus. The I-cord is used to encase a strand of LEDs and was then continuously woven into a swatch. When the LEDs are turned on, light emits from the center of the I-cord and begins the undyeing process.
After 72 hours the swatch is notably lighter, but is still variable in color due to the fact we wove the I-cord into a swatch form.
