Harry Potter and The Fact That Wizards Are Really Lacking When It Comes to Tailoring (or, Programmable Textiles)
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” Arthur C. Clarke, 1962
What comes to mind when you see the words “sufficiently advanced technology”? Computers? Smartphones? The PS5?
When Arthur C Clarke wrote that quote in 1962, the things we can do now with the click of a button would’ve been deemed impossible. And yet, here I am, typing on a machine thats no bigger than a school textbook and certainly a lot lighter, writing about a quote that I found on the internet, on a platform where I can potentially give the entire world access to my words.
59 years from now, who knows what “sufficiently advanced technology” will look like? Maybe a solar powered car that flies grumpy old-lady Charlotte to her bingo game, or self lacing Nike Air Mags that don’t cost $71,000, or finally, finally, a real actual hover board that actually hovers! And yeah, these may be the ways in which 2015 fell short of the expectations of every American raised in the 1980s, but the point is, magic!
Let’s take it down a notch and talk about “magic” on a smaller scale. Im about to pivot to one of my favorite topic of conversation, Harry Potter, so, for those of you who havent read what i consider the greatest works of fiction of all time (except for Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus), I recommend highly recommend closing your laptop and finding a copy of Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone to curl up with!
Now that we’re all on the same page, remember Harry meets Malfoy at Madame Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions in Diagon Alley? Both are getting their Hogwarts robes tailored, and Malfoy, the forever-charming and charismatic child that he is, strikes up a conversation. Harry (reasonably) begins to get the impression that Malfoy is a bit of a *excuse my language* stuck-up butthead, and is glad when Madame Malkin accidentally pokes him with a pin. This is the part where all my fellow sewers go, “I’m sorry, what?”
This lady, a fully trained witch who can literally teleport and make things appear out of thin air is tailoring by hand?
See, tailoring by hand is frustrating, painful, and sometimes feels impossible. There’s a reason it remains one of the few trades that’s lasted to this day. Because it’s so individualized — to the wearer and the garment — it requires a human hand. Modern day machines aren’t up to the capability to sew pieces of garments together when they’re originally being made, much less tailor a specific item to an individual’s specific standards.
So a self tailoring garment is out of the question. The concept is magical beyond the wizarding world. The existence of such is…*queue frozen gif*
Of course, the title of this article and the fact that the longwinded intro has come to this point, reveal that self-tailoring garments are not, in fact, a product of sorcery. It is yet another thing to add to the list of What Muggles Do Better, along with phones, music, and raising children in healthy environments.
So, what’s the deal with this self tailoring garment? This brings us to the field of programmable materials, a promising area of technology in its earlier stages of development. When I first heard the phrase, “programmable materials” I imagined wires enmeshed in a material, be it wood, metal, textiles, etc, hooked up to a central chip, which you can connect to your phone and use an app to manipulate the material in question to your liking. And these sort of technologies do exist; they are commonly called “smart materials” or “e-materials”. Programmable materials are a somewhat simpler concept, yet it’s this “simplicity” that makes them all the more difficult to work with.
Some Basics
Programmable materials are “materials that can change shape according to instructions that are essentially programmed into them”, according to Skylar Tibbits (great name, right!?), founder and head of Self Assembly Lab at MIT, one of the leading research labs globally in programmable materials. But it’s MIT, so that’s probably not very surprising!
What Tibbits means by “programming” isn’t the typical JavaScript, HTML, Python sort of computer programming that you’re probably thinking of. The “programs” inside the material are the material’s natural tendencies to respond to certain stimuli (water, heat, and pressure, to name a few) and the way in which they do so.
And so, to fully understand a material, you have to think small. Really small. As in, atoms small. Everything in the world is made of atoms, of which billions of trillions are physically and chemically bound to create the meta-structures that we humans are able to see and experience. For anyone who’s taken a chemistry course, you’ve likely come to realize that the type of atoms and the way they are bound to each other within a substance determines how said substance reacts and interacts with the world around it. When programming a material, scientists have to keep the “traits” of the substance in mind, which are pretty predictable, to an extent. Understanding substances at a microscopic level is vital to all areas of Materials Science — emerging fields like programmables are no exception. And that’s what makes materials science so much more complex than it seems on the surface. Each interaction between each individual atom in a substance plays a role in how the substance reacts to stimuli, but amassing all that data to create understanding of a material on that level would be impossible even for a super computer (but not a quantum computer… :))
Thankfully, we don’t need to rely on currently non-existent computing power to create actual, physical, programmable materials. Programmables researchers were smart (whoda thunk it!?) and have figured out how to program materials that, while not completely understood, scientists have had a solid understanding of for a while. To unlock a material’s programable potential, scientists must consider its natural characteristics.
And what better to program than one of the most used materials in human history: wood! Scientists at Self Assembly Labs have developed programmable 3-D printed wood composites that are activated by water.
Wood-bending is a really time- and energy-intensive process. The natural pattern of the woodgrain and wood’s physical properties (ie. it’s super brittle) make the process even harder. Knowing this, and the fact that cellulose (what wood is primarily made of) expands when wet, the scientists created a filament of sawdust and plastic which they then use to print custom wood grain, which they activate with water. If this makes no sense or sounds like it’s unimpressive, just check out the photo below:
As seen in the photo above, different composites can be combined to create and overall material that will very predictively shape itself in the way scientists want. While this specific application may seem narrow (though I do love a good elephant), the process and the result reflect the overall goal of the growing programmables field — to take a cheap, easily accessible materials and bend them to our will in a way thats cheap and easy.
Programmable Textiles
Fabric is a perfect example of a material that is cheap and easily accessible, but bending it to our will is not a feat to take lightly. Sewing takes hours of patience, preparation, undoing and re-doing seams, pressing, trying on, and making adjustments.
The process to create the top you’re wearing (given that you bought it somewhere that doesn’t custom-sew every item of clothing) isn’t quite as long, but I’m telling you — sewing, in all contexts, is like 80% preparation, all so it fits right.
Even if your clothing are from somewhere like H&M or Zara, who mass produce their products, the process is a lot more labor intensive than you’d expect. The whole “Small, Medium, Large” sizing makes the process slightly easier, but everyone’s body is different (and custom sewing is not economically feasible in this day and age), so it’s really hard to buy something that gives you ‘the perfect fit’.
And what happens if ‘the perfect fit’ for you changes day to day (aka, you’re a finicky teenager or millennial!)? Now you’ll be buying two tops, one fitted, one loose, which costs more and creates more waste.
What are programmable textiles?
Enter — you guessed it! — programmable textiles. I introduced them as self-tailoring garments, which, in a way, they are. They also aren't. Textiles don’t just encompass the fabric that makes up your clothes. There are all those other fabrics that make up curtains, and your sofa and the seats in your car, for example. Most of the applications of programmable textiles that I personally am interested in are in apparel, although self-drawing curtains would sure be pretty awesome!
Like all programmables, programmable textiles are textiles specifically engineered to react in a predictable way to certain stimuli. Though it may not seem so, this is really impressive.
Textile engineering itself is complicated enough. Engineers have to factor in, of course, the purpose of the textile, but along with that, the ideal flexibility and stretch of a fabric, the texture, permeability, biocompatibility, and ideal weight, to name a few. Now, you have to factor in the natural tendencies of the fiber(s) you’re using among other things, so you can “program” the fabric to do what you would like it to do. See now why the concept is so impressive?
How are programmable textiles made?
Scientists, being the little smarticle particles that they are, have actually found multiple ways to program textiles! Some quick basics to make understanding a bit easier: what is known in its end product as a ‘fabric’ or a ‘textile’ starts out as a fiber, which is spun into yarn, which is either knitted or weaved into the resulting fabric. Often times, fabrics will be made of a combination of many different fibers and/or yarns.
The first method of programming textiles is relatively simple: scientists stretch the textile and add another material in a specific pattern to stimulate the textile to behave as desired. This can be done through printing, bonding, or spraying. Then, once released, the textile often takes a shape different to how it was before, usually a 3D structure.
The second method is similar to the creation of programmable wood composites. Scientists develop a composite textile in a similar fashion to the wood composites, by considering each material’s natural response to certain stimuli and using that data to determine the composition of the composite. For example, “Active Textile” as it’s called, featured at the Smithsonian Design Museum in The Senses: Design Beyond Vision Exhibition in 2018, is a composite textile with small perforations that remind me of those car-wash noodle thingys. They ‘open’ when stimulated by light.
The third method is based strongly in biomimicry, though, from the get-go it doesn’t exactly sound like it is.
Basically, scientists use conventional machines that are commonly used in day to day textile creation, but with some specific modifications to the fabrics. This may come in the form of an active fiber being weaved/knit into the fabric along with other, passive fibers. It may look like yarns wound in different angles or with different amounts of twist. It also may look like the various patterns and scales in which the fabric is knit.
Regardless, every single fiber, yarn, and stitch that goes into the fabric is carefully chosen. Scientists focus on mimicking biological structures that respond to a given stimuli in whatever way is ideal, and try to structure their fabric according to a hierarchy that starts at the makeup of the cell (the textile equivalent is the fiber) all the way to the macroscopic tissue (the textile equivalent being the entire textile itself).
This allows for functional fabrics that actually do what we want to be created very easily. The whole process isn’t perfect yet, but its likely that this is the method that will most likely used in clothing, like these climate-active textiles that have been made into active-wear (haha get it?) :)
Side note: Auxetics
I can’t talk about programmable textiles and leave out auxetics (though auxetics aren’t textiles, technically!). Frankly, they deserve their own article (honestly, every type of programmable textile that I mentioned deserves it’s own article!!), but for the time being, I’ll just cover some basics.
And the most basic thing about auxetics? Auxetics are weird. Usually, when you, say, pull a piece of fabric lengthwise, the length (obviously) gets longer, but the width gets shorter. when you stretch and exotic material in the same way, the width of the material actually increases, the exact opposite of what seems logical, even possible.
However, if you’ve ever seen or worn a pair of those sneakers that Nike and Adidas brand as ‘running shoes’ (though they have minimal support!), that the kids these days like to wear, you’ve experienced auxetics in action.
Why do auxetics behave like this?
Auxetics are defined as having a negative Poisson’s Ratio, the attributing factor to their weird behavior. Poisson’s ratio is the negative ratio of lateral to longitudinal strain on a substance, which effectively measures the deformation of a material perpendicular to the direction that force has been applied.
Some naturally occurring materials, namely, certain tissues, display auxetics properties. In labs, however, scientists generally take non-auxetics and give them auxetic properties by altering the material’s microstructure to give geometric control that we can see in the macrostructure. I just used a lot of fancy words, so if that made no sense, check out this video to get a pretty basic idea of how auxetics generally look and function.
Programmable Auxetics
As you likely saw in the video, the auxetics materials only change shape when the man directly applies force to them. Self Assembly Lab has created heat-active auxetics that (surprise!) exhibit auxetic properties when they are exposed to heat.
Because traditional auxetic materials rely on humans to apply the necessary force to get them to change, heat-active auxetics, which effectively act autonomously, have numerous potential applications in any situation where materials that stretch and compressed are used, including in clothing. In addition, future active auxetics are being engineered to respond to different stimuli than heat, like moisture or light. We’ll probably start to see active auxetics in packaging and crash protection; really any areas that involve stretching and compression.
Final thoughts
For those of you that have made it this far, I have more news for you. Everything in the programmables field that I’ve subscribed thus far is only a tiny section of what research in this field includes. I haven’t even mentioned robotics, meta-materials other than certain textiles, and, one of the most scary and awesome potential applications of all time, claytronics.
For a relatively unknown field, the development of programmables so far, as well as the reach of it’s potential applications, are, in my opinion, pretty insane. Three months ago, a self-tailoring shirt would’ve been magic to me, but it very much exists. And, as research persists, this technology will continue to get better and better until one day we find ourselves buying a top made out of active textiles. What now seems like magic will become part of normal life, just like phones, cars, airplanes, all that jazz.
It doesn’t look like Madame Malkin is going to be getting involved in something as ‘riddikulus’ as Muggle science, though. Looks like self tailoring garments will be like ‘magic’ in the Wizarding World for the foreseeable future!
