AdaCAD Review

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It’s too free in the parametric mode, that in the end when transiting to the draft, it turned out the design is impossible for a hand-weaver to weave anymore.

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AdaCAD is a parametric design tool for designing woven textile structures.

These examples highlight how interactive, dynamic, or “smart” textiles are less invented than adapted from well established techniques with present day materials and/or functional concerns.

his paper focuses on how weavers approach designing complex and/or 3D woven textiles

AdaCAD is an open-source parametric design tool for designing and arrang- ing woven structures into weaving drafts (i.e. instruction files to guide both human-led and machine-led weaving).

We found the weavers with whom we worked have a rich di- versity of practices, approaches, and design conventions. Their approaches emerged from their local contexts: the kinds of looms, materials, and software to which they have access, and the particular vocabularies and conventions of their local weaving communities.

. In the context of weaving, an evolving history of woven notational forms (e.g. from swatch to draft to punch card to bitmap image) have illuminated the algebraic logics by which weavers construct cloth to non-weaving audiences.

Under the category of textiles, there are three sub-classes: woven textiles (denim, etc.), non-woven textiles (felt, paper, etc.), and knitted tex- tiles (jersey, etc.). Each sub-category carries a rich history and set of techniques. Our focus on weaving is due to our familiarity with the process, its continued use as one of the primary modes of textile production globally, and its common (and rapidly increasing) use within HCI.

AdaCAD codifies these common manipulations into operations such as: (a) invert, which swaps the visibility of the warp and weft, and is often used for color shifting in structure design and (b) stretch, which repeats a structure across a larger regions of warps and wefts such that multiple yarns act as one. This is often used to adjust the density of the cloth.

The specific way that the weave is drafted, the materials used to weave, the ratios used between the yarns, and the intensity at which the human (or machine) beats the cloth, determines the mechanical properties of the cloth. The draft, then, is an incomplete, but still useful, representation of weave structure.

A float is a place where the weft is not interlaced and instead, floats over the surface of the cloth on the front or back face. Interlacements give cloth stability and shapes its mechanics. For example, a twill weave orients in- terlacements along a diagonal line, which results in the ability of the cloth to sheer in one direction. Double cloth (or double weave) orients interlacements on different groups or “systems” of yarns, allowing for pockets or multiple layers to form.

In her book “Mastering Weave Structure”, Alderman writes “when you understand the underlying principles that govern a particular kind of structure, then you can modify the basic draft [of the structure] to obtain the result you want” [ 18 ]. The AdaCAD software presents these structural principles and modifications as parametric design components which can be combined and linked together to generate new structures with emergent behaviors.

textile-based or otherwise soft electronics grows within HCI, s

In their review of woven electronic systems in HCI, Pouta et al. provide a detailed summary of the state of weaving in HCI while noting the need for more design support tools that account for the new concerns that emerge with interactivity [ 61].

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Most of these tools follow a paradigm of direct-design, whereby a structure/draft is produced by manually clicking cells within an empty draft, and then filling regions of artwork with those structures to produce visual or mechanical effects.

Our original publication of AdaCAD in 2019 exists within this space by presenting designers with multiple linked views of their design: one emphasizing woven structure and the other emphasizing the path of electronics through the cloth

the present version of AdaCAD includes a different approach where a user develops a structure through a parametric design workflow. This approach shares similarities with approaches like “visual programming” or “procedural design”, yet, we chose the term parametric design because we find our user inter- face to be slightly more abstracted from the code than in the other two cases.

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Source: Experimental Textiles

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Reference

https://docs.adacad.org/docs/about/research/#adacad-parametric-design-as-a-new-form-of-notation-for-complex-weaving-chi-2023

Experimental textiles, by Laura Devendorf from ATLAS Institute & Dept. of Information Science, Colorado

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfILVSANRps&t=203s

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