A LIVING, BREATHING TEXTILE
Textile production has historically been a bellwether for innovations in manufacturing — from technological improvements such as the spinney jenny and the flying shuttle at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to recent developments in electronic and reactive textiles by designers such as Joanna Berzowska MS '99, who are transforming fabrics into wearable computers. Now, bioLogic, a research team in the Tangible Media Group within the MIT Media Lab, has created a completely new form of performance fabric that combines biomaterials research with textile design. BioLogic is growing living actuators and synthesizing responsive bio-skin in the era where, they declare, “bio is the new interface.” They say, “we are imagining a world where actuators and sensors can be grown rather than manufactured, being derived from nature as opposed to engineered in factories.”
Under the direction of Professor Hiroshi Ishii, the bioLogic team has unearthed a new behavior of the ancient bacteria Bacillus subtilis natto: the expansion and contraction of the natto cells relative to atmospheric moisture. The team is capitalizing on this natural phenomenon by embedding the bacteria into fabric to ventilate garments. They harvest the animate natto cells in a bio lab and assemble them with a micron-resolution bio-printing system, transforming them into responsive fashion, a “second skin.” The synthetic bio-skin reacts to body heat and sweat, causing flaps around heat zones to open, enabling sweat to evaporate and cool down the body through an organic material flux.
Source: MIT
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