Press Release
Ozgun Kilic Afsar Is Honored with the Bronze A' Design Award for OmniFiber Self Sensing Morphing Textiles in Textile, Fabric, Textures, Patterns and Cloth Design
Ozgun Kilic Afsar honored for textile, fabric, textures, patterns and cloth design by the international grand jury of the 2021 - 2022 A' Design Award & Competition
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
COMO, Italy, April 22, 2022 /DesignNewswire/ OmniFiber Self Sensing Morphing Textiles by Ozgun Kilic Afsar has been granted the Bronze A' Design Award in the Textile, Fabric, Textures, Patterns and Cloth Design category, A' Design Award & Competition has announced. The recognition forms part of the 2021 - 2022 A' Design Award & Competition and was determined through blind peer review by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members, who evaluated anonymized entries against predetermined criteria.
About the Bronze A' Design Award
The Bronze A' Design Award is given to outstanding designs that showcase a high degree of creativity and practicality. It recognizes the dedication and skill of designers who produce work that stands out for its thoughtful development and innovative use of materials and technology. These designs are acknowledged for their professional execution and potential to influence industry standards positively. Winning this award highlights the designer's ability to blend form and function effectively, offering solutions that enhance people's lives and wellbeing.
More About OmniFiber Self Sensing Morphing Textiles
OmniFiber is a microfluidic fiber technology for robotic textiles and garments. The fiber senses its own deformation and responds mechanically to it. OmniFiber contracts, extends, bends and coils with immediate response, high contraction ratio and high force output. A single fiber can be as thin as 500 microns and as large as 2 millimeters in diameter, and it can be knitted or woven into fabric. A wearable control module varies air pressure and flow rate to program the motion. Applications include kinesthetic wearables, dynamic fitting garments and textile-based haptic devices.
About Ozgun Kilic Afsar
Ozgun Kilic Afsar. is a Ph.D. candidate at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and a Research Affiliate at MIT Media Lab. Her current research focuses on integrated soft robotic fibers and textiles that correspond to the dexterity of human biomechanics. Such active textile systems feature multimodal haptic feedback to kinesthetically support skill acquisition and transfer in creative movement practices. This work has recently been featured as a cover story on MIT News. She is currently exploring robotic upper-bodyware’s potential to allow for intergenerational interactions in the context of opera, such as two experts singing a duet across time and space.
Award Record
With this recognition, Ozgun Kilic Afsar is a winner of 1 A' Design Award.
About the A' Textile, Fabric, Textures, Patterns and Cloth Design Award
The A' Textile Design Award is an international textile design competition recognizing good textile designs by best textile designers and brands worldwide. The competition is organized within the A' Design Award & Competition and is open to textile designers, fabric engineers, texture and pattern creators and clothing companies from all countries. Entries typically include structural fabric, engineered cloth, smart textiles, technical textiles, woven fabric and jacquard fabric. Awarded textile designs are published at https://desingers.org/design-category/textile
About A' Design Award & Competition
A' Design Award & Competition is an international, juried design accolade organized annually since 2008. The competition is open to entries from all countries. The A' Design Award has a philanthropic mission to advance society through good design by recognizing and promoting superior products, projects and services that benefit society, and by creating a global awareness and appreciation for good design practices and principles. Entries are peer reviewed and anonymously evaluated by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members against predetermined criteria such as functionality, ergonomics, engineering, presentation, innovation, usability, sustainability and technology, with score normalization applied to remove biases. Awards are conferred at Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron levels. The A' Design Prize granted to eligible laureates includes the award trophy, the certificate of design excellence, the hardcover yearbook, a lifetime license to use the A' Design Award winner logo, exhibition of awarded works, an invitation to the gala night and award ceremony in Italy, inclusion in the World Design Rankings and Designer Rankings, and public relations and publicity services. Registration, the upload of a work and the preliminary score are free of charge, and Professional and Digital Edition laureates are not contractually obliged to pay further fees to claim the A' Design Prize. Further information is available at https://competition.adesignaward.com
Press Resources
- Winner Page: https://desingers.org/131625
- A' Design Award Page: https://competition.adesignaward.com/131625
- Media Showcase: https://www.designnewsroom.com/!131625
- Laureate Profile: https://desingers.org/d/315149
- Further Information from the Laureate: http://bit.ly/3Mjldl5
Media Contact
Giulia Ferrari, Press Office
Designers.Org
Via Leone Leoni 32, 22100 Como, Italy
press@designers.org
+39 031 4491953
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Fact Sheet
The Work
- Project
- OmniFiber Self Sensing Morphing Textiles
- Function
- Self Sensing Morphing Textiles
- Category
- Textile, Fabric, Textures, Patterns and Cloth Design
- Discipline
- Fashion Design
- Industry
- Fashion and Furniture & Home
- Colors
- Peru, Indian Red, Tomato, Chocolate and Sienna
- Images
- 5
The Recognition
- Laureate
- Ozgun Kilic Afsar
- Country
- Sweden
- Recognition
- Bronze A' Design Award
- Edition
- 2021 - 2022
- Design ID
- #131625
Credits
- Team
- Ali Shtarbanov and Hiroshi Ishii
- Image Credits
- All Photo credits to Ozgun Kilic Afsar, 2021. All Video credits to MIT, 2021.
Design Details
- Unique Properties
- OmniFiber is a high-pressure microfluidic fiber technology for robotic textiles and garments. The fiber is engineered to sense its own physical deformation and mechanically respond to it. OmniFiber has versatile morphing behavior such as contracting, extending, bending and coiling with immediate response, high contraction ratio and high force output. This allows a myriad of applications including kinesthetic wearables for skill learning and transfer, dynamic fitting garments, and textile-based haptic devices for telepresence applications.
- Inspiration
- Textiles are vital to our survival across scales, from medical textiles that repair our organs to blankets that provide warmth and protection. Although the development of textiles is intertwined with that of human progress, they are still valued as static and disposable goods. Advanced fibers have the potential to create a whole new industry where textiles can sense surroundings; store energy; and communicate in a single package. This will increase the value of textiles to society, transforming them from something we buy, use and throw away, to a platform for experiences and services.
- Research
- Advances in materials science invite visions of a world where people interact with machines through garments. OmniFiber presents a novel textile technology where actuated fibers are used to make self-sensing robotic fabrics. The fabrication and comprehensive system design provide designers with an accessible way to knit and weave fluidic morphing swatches. OmniFiber operates with low power, high bandwidth and is strong enough to lift kilograms of weight, making it an ideal technology for kinesthetic wearables such as respiratory regulation-wear, soft exoskeletons for dance pedagogy, and peristaltic compression garments.
- Challenge
- Recently, there have been remarkable advancements that yield a myriad of engineered fibers, however prior work has often focused on achieving either sensing or actuation, but seldom both. Readily employed fibers such as shape memory alloys have limitations that hinder their integration to everyday interactions. These are high cost, slow response, small forces, arduous training, and risk of burning the skin. To overcome these challenges, we established a fiber technology that uses off-the-shelf materials, is scalable, machine-knittable, safe to wear, and has immediate response.
- Realization and Technology
- This work demonstrates that microfluidic actuation with reinforced tubular elastomers can be leveraged for fluidic morphing matter that acts as a fiber in a fabric assembly. The technology is designed for closed loop Human Textile Interaction by applying localized sensor nodes on the fiber body. A mechanical programming pipeline is developed for versatile morphing states by adding on-demand mechanical constraints. With various assemblies made of OmniFibers, in-fabric haptic feedback is achieved including high frequency oscillations, lateral skin stretch, and compression.
- Operation and Interaction
- The system design consists of a fiber based interface and a wearable pneumatic control module that together convert energy from a compressed fluid medium to mechanical motion. The fiber behavior is programmed by miniaturized valves in the control module that vary air pressure and flow rate, operated through a graphical interface. The users can interact with OmniFiber based devices leveraging the closed loop strain control functionality for real time, and record-playback interactions, or alternatively design morphing behavior using the event scheduler on the graphical interface.
- Project Duration and Location
- Started in April 2020 at MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts and ended in November 2021. The work has been presented and demonstrated at the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in October 2021.
- Specifications
- A single OmniFiber device can be as thin as 500 microns and as large as 2 millimeters in diameter. They can be fabricated theoretically at infinite lengths, although we have so far achieved a continuous fabrication of a 60 meters-long fiber spool. A single contractible fiber of 1.8 mm diameter exhibits forces up to 19 Newtons, demonstrating high speeds of linear actuation with as little as 5 milliseconds response time for full-state morphing.
- Keywords
- Interaction Design, Materials Research, Human-Textile Interaction, Morphing User Interfaces, Haptic Devices, Soft Sensors and Actuators, Microfluidics, Intelligent Textiles, Fibers
