Animating Material: Exploring Spatial Vitality Through Performative Textile

The scope of my graduate thesis identifies and explores design strategies to consider how the manipulation of textiles can stimulate engagements between humans and the materials they engage within the built environment. The experimental installations of the research seek to encourage interactions between people and textile-based artifacts to contribute to the consideration and formation of dynamic spaces. This research investigates how to provoke gestures of makers and non-makers through interactive designed artifacts that occupy a determined space. The adaptability of the artifacts are created within the installations, simultaneously dynamic in both time and space, which elicit corporeal actions. Through time spent with the materials in a determined space, participants access and align the forms they create with their own narratives and musings. The majority of the material experiments within this research focussed on design within a textile architecture. Structural forms with spatial implications emerged from the experiments. More specifically, the concept of spatial vitality was explored through responsive textile forms and artifacts with lighting. A Material Reflective Research approach was developed in the early stages of the design process, which later shifted from an emphasis on practice-based research to practice-led research. The research described started with a dominant lean towards an internally focussed material exploration of the designer and evolved to an approach that sought to create interactive experiences for people. Throughout this process, a wide range of materials and techniques were explored as means for spatial vitality to occur between the maker and the material. The outcomes of this process took the form of a lighting installation for people to experience a transformation of their imagination within the space of the design. This study not only addressed the significant contemporary design issue of the complex relationship between people and objects, but also aimed to gain a deeper and more meaningful understanding of materiality through design and action in a poetic space of performative interaction. Through the design of a multi-sensorial lighting installation people were invited to engage and to respond through various actions, gestures, and movements, expanding the experience beyond vision. This interrelationship between participants and artifacts intends to enhance an awareness and appreciation of life, both of theirs and artifacts. Animating Material connects people with designed artifacts, such that a passive observer could become an active participant in a dynamic and symbiotic reciprocity, a conversation with performative textiles.