smart textiles with irmandy wicaksono
Image credit: Steve Boxall/ZERO-G. Courtesy of Irmandy Wicaksono.
Irmandy Wicaksono (born 1993) is a transdisciplinary engineer, artist, and designer with a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wicaksono was part of the Responsive Environments Group and a Research and Teaching Assistant at the mentioned institution. He holds a B.Eng. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Southampton and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from ETH Zurich. Irmandy has recently joined the Division of Industrial Design at the National University of Singapore as an Assistant Professor, where he directs the Soft Technologies Lab.
Wicaksono’s work has been covered in numerous magazines such as Forbes, Domus, FastCompany, and Wired Italia and presented in events such as Burning Man, Cambridge Science Festival, and the World Economic Forum. His work appeared in Springer Nature and was a member of the Google Arts and Culture Design Sprint in 2020.
LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: You are researching transdisciplinary engineering via soft electronics embedded in textiles. What attracted you to textiles?
IRMANDY WICAKSONO: I am an electrical engineer by training, and my undergraduate thesis focused on optimizing energy harvesting efficiency - from thermoelectric generators that convert heat into power. I have always been interested in technological innovations (laugh), but as a child, I was drawn to design - specifically in fashion and music tech. The electronic devices that marked my teenage years, such as iPods, always intrigued me and led to my focus on electronics. However, my interest in design remained. Following my undergraduate studies, I did an exciting internship with Studio XO, a fashion tech company in London.
Studio XO was an interdisciplinary environment where I worked with industrial and fashion designers, making these incredible futuristic dresses. Their vision was to enable people to fly through dresses, and I was working on a couple of robotic dresses that involved the integration of electronics.
Back then, the iTunes Festival was still a thing, and they would always invite different artists. During the festival (2013), Studio XO worked for Tech House, a division of the House of Gaga - a group that designs dresses for Lady Gaga. She loves bubbles, so the team tried to figure out how it works. We devised a 3D-printed dress, Anemome, with wireless bubble machine generators distributed everywhere in the clothing. I was involved in how to transport bubbles via liquid machine storage to the generator and had to synchronize the process of opening and closing the machine with timing. The liquid flows to the open module to a bubble film and is met with a fan system that spins and creates the bubble.
Credits: StudioXO/TechHaus. Images courtesy Irmandy Wicaksono.
LŠ: So this internship was formative in opening a direction for you of intersection between electronics and wearable design.
IW: I got so interested in this intersection that I started googling about courses in wearable electronics, and ETH Zurich came up. They run this fantastic Wearable Computing Lab, but unluckily, the group was dissolving back then. Otherwise, I would have loved to stay at ETH to do more research.
LŠ: MIT is not too bad (laugh).
IW: (Laugh) True, so I worked on woven electronic textiles while doing my Master's at ETH.
LŠ: Why did you jump from the woven to the knitted process?
IW: Initially, it was woven textiles because that was simply the project I was working on. Woven fabrics are fascinating because they offer this intersection of rows and columns. Think about it from an architectural or even an electronics perspective - you can utilize this structure to create grids. It's interesting because some people may not be aware, but trackpads or touchscreens are based on these grids of conductive traces, and we can apply this concept to textiles to create physical interfaces.
If you look closely at trackpads, especially in older phones, they have these almost invisible grids - essentially a matrix of lines intersecting. When you touch these intersections, they can precisely determine your location computationally.
The more I work on textiles, the more I see the similarities between textiles and electronics - it is fascinating! The way you make wires is similar to fibers - a process called thermal drawing. That's precisely how fibers are created - like cables and braidings; sometimes, they have different layers inside, which is how you strengthen them. When you screen print electronics, those traces are created via photolithography. In my country, Indonesia, we have a technique called Batik or wax patterning, where you use subtractive fabrication on fabric. You apply wax, add coloring, then boil it so the wax is removed - repeating the process as needed. This method is akin to how traces are currently made on electronics. Hopefully, in the future, the textile and electronics industries will merge into one, and we can start incorporating computation and electronic functionalities into our everyday textiles.
Nowadays, we're producing different objects using advanced computational and digital fabrications, but even more intriguing is that the process doesn't end once the product is finished. Even in the post-production, there's room for adjustments by reprogramming - opening up new possibilities. The potential is big - with numerous applications across different industries.
LŠ: Obviously, your work has many applications, from the medical industry to art, design, and architecture - so I wanted to stop at your work E-TeCS, where sensors are directly embedded into digitally-knit textiles. I would love to hear the story behind the project and, if there are already talks, to have it developed on a larger scale. It would revolutionize many industries, such as healthcare.
IW: If you look at my projects, they span from the scale of a shoe or a scarf to architectural objects. Essentially, my work revolves around making electronics or printed circuits more flexible and soft. The electronics used in our phones and computers are rigid and heavy, which aren't compatible with the human body.
Integrating electronics with textiles is still pretty primitive - often just layered on each other without seamless integration. In the E-TeCS project, I wanted to address this by enabling the overall system to be stretchable through the structure of the circuit itself. I've implemented serpentine interconnects into flexible circuit design, which functions like a horse-shoe loop, allowing these connections to stretch, thanks to the elastic nature of the structure. The goal is to embed these electronic strips into textiles, creating channels within the fabric to accommodate these strips - I work with printed circuits as another form of digital fabrication. Through an encapsulation method, the e-textile system is also washable. The design enables the suit to withstand daily wear and maintenance.
Credits: MIT Media Lab. Courtesy I. Wicaksono.
Credits: MIT Media Lab. Courtesy I. Wicaksono.
LŠ: Are you looking at scaling it up?
IW: Yes, and I'm also interested in incorporating multiple modalities beyond basic physiological sensing - the project looked into heart rate, respiration, and temperature, but we have many other health sensing modalities.
Customization is a key aspect of the project, especially considering that clothing tends to be loose - so sensors have to be able to adjust to the body for accurate data. But yes, you're right, this technology has vast applications. We have recently developed an active compression suit, integrating blood flow and pressure sensors and pneumatic systems to help astronauts adapt to microgravity environments. Collaborations with healthcare institutions and hospitals are essential to testing this technology on a larger scale. When I mention larger scale here, it's not just about the physical size; I'm also referring to more significant numbers of users and broader applications across different form factors and environments.
LŠ: With the rise of “smart cities" - how do you see the potential for collaboration (also across other MIT Labs)? We recently interviewed Carlo Ratti from Senseable City Lab at MIT. This intersection of data collection and urban planning could revolutionize how we interact with our surroundings and envision future cities.
IW: Textiles extend beyond clothing and curtains; they could even be the structural elements of buildings. My research vision is to integrate these technologies into the very fabric of our surroundings, creating interconnected, physical-digital nervous systems that provide information about everything from our bodies to our environment. Yes, the crowd sensing and big data from this large-scale network of sensors would align with Carlo Ratti's vision of responsive environments and cities that understand the inhabitants and adapt to their needs.
3DKnITS: Irmandy Wicaksono
LŠ: Tapis Magique (The Magic Carpet) is a large-scale knitted electronic textile that responds to external pressures. Is this your first exploration of the intersection between sound and fibers?
IW: The Magic Carpet initially stemmed from the Lexus Design Award, where I received a grant to develop my prototype of the Knitted Keyboard further and had access to mentors who challenged me to delve deeper into the technology's potential use. The Magic Carpet emerged from a desire to blend aesthetics and functionality. As an engineer, I feel that I have this ability to bring ideas to life.
In essence, the Magic Carpet project seeks to expand and demonstrate the scalability of knitted textiles. The beauty of working with machine knitting lies in its versatility - enabling the creation of large-scale and customized products. During that time, I explored smart mats that would detect pressure patterns. Our interactions with the world often involve contact pressure—such as sitting and walking. This research led me to create a larger version of a mat - a carpet. The project was inspired by the traditional craftsmanship and patterns of textiles from Indonesia and their deep relationship with dance and music – I wanted to bring these elements into a contemporary context. The Magic Carpet is a fusion of technology and tradition; while it may look solely like a textile, it's actually an advanced sensorial experience. The soundscape is triggered as a dancer engages with it - bridging the digital and physical experience. Textiles are complex materials with so much potential; I hope more young people get interested in working with them.
Tapis Magique: Irmandy Wicaksono
Tapis Magique: Irmandy Wicaksono
LŠ: There is a new trend developing of merging fashion and architectural material knowledge. I would love to hear more about your research into architecture via The Living Knitwork Pavilion.
IW: The Living Knitwork Pavilion has become a testbed for various research and performances at the Media Lab through this idea of spatial sensing. Surrounding the pavilion, a distributed electric field sensor - detects your location and movements. The Living Knitwork Pavilion is a research project in large-scale 3D-knitted electronic textile installations guided by physical and digital immersion.
The pavilion is the largest structure I have worked on so far, and it was developed for the 2023 Burning Man, an event run and operated by artists and builders from around the world. It is a community - where you contribute by making the 'city' alive - we sometimes call it the gifting economy (laugh). It takes place in a desert, and what I like about it - is that it has a culture of giving, immediacy, and self-reliance. My favorite thing about Burning Man is the majestic large-scale structural art put in a vast desert landscape, and they almost become like a mirage.
Textiles have protection and expression abilities, so we also wanted to look at their performance via the central structure. I worked with architects and structural engineers from the MIT School of Architecture+Planning and looked at how the structure would hold the Knitwork fabrics that should be able to withstand these different wind loads in Black Rock City, which can go up to 70 miles per hour. If you think about the large-scale textiles under a strong wind, it would basically become a sail (laugh). So, we redesigned the structure and made it more robust by anchoring it to the grounds and connecting it with the Living Knitwork fabrics via custom 3D-knitted channels and sailing ropes.
What is fascinating about the pavilion is that it knows where you are and your activity as you move around and interact with it. And at the same time, individually or collectively, you're controlling an immersive soundscape and lighting in real-time. At night, the pavilion becomes this responsive lantern. During the day, it serves as a shade and shifts its visual experience through the photochromic fabrics (that changed color from their base). The Knitwork would glow, and its color would gradually change from blue to purple and green - depending on the time of the day. These are all interactivity enabled by functional yarns, including conductive, luminous, and photochromic yarns integrated seamlessly through digital knitting.
The pattern design inspiration came from temples in Indonesia, and I experimented with knitting patterns that allowed patterns to pop up like reliefs, resembling carvings. And it's incredible how people have been experiencing it. In architecture, we always talk about the human experience of architecture and its effects on society. Now, I am still hearing back and learning from people as to how they experienced the Living Knitwork Pavilion during last year's Burning Man. We just finished the Living Knitwork installation at the MIT Media Lab lobby. We are also excited to exhibit and demonstrate it with its virtual reality experience in other venues, starting with SXSW in Austin, Texas, this March.
All images credits: Living Knitwork Pavilion: Irmandy Wicaksono
*video credit: Irmandy Wicaksono/MIT Media Lab
LŠ: Are you planning to do more pavilions?
IW: That is a great question (laugh). Hopefully, yes! I learned from my last project that it involves a lot of logistics. I've been fortunate to work with all of these capable and ambitious people.