A new materials technique has taken cues from granny’s wool bag and cutting-edge technology and could see us with entire furniture sets and the fabrics covering them being ‘solid-knitted.’ What’s more, it can be undone for reuse in a completely different form, making it sustainable, versatile and a whole lot of reconfigurable fun.
It’s the decade-long work of Yuichi Hirose, who first imagined this unique technique while a student at Keio University in Tokyo. While working on digital fabrication methods at the Hiroya Tanaka Laboratory there, he had the idea to incorporate knitting—yes, needles and yarn—into a new type of fabrication.
“My dream is to have these robust knitting machines in use all over the world,” said Hirose, who is currently working with a research team led by James McCannow at Carnegie Mellon University to make this a reality.
Carnegie Mellon University
The prototype of the solid knitting machine made its debut this week at the annual SIGGRAPH conference, which showcases computer graphics and interactive techniques, and won an honorable mention in the Best Paper category.
Plain knitting
So what exactly is it? As that video explains, solid knit isn’t too far off from 3D printing, in that objects are built layer by layer with material fed through an automated, programmed machine. The machine has a series of hooked needles with latches that can be instructed to manipulate the yarn as rows of knit are built both horizontally and vertically.
“Solid Knitting is a new technique for producing dense, rigid objects through knitting,” Hirose wrote in a blog post for SIGGRAPH. “Similar to 3D printing, it builds objects layer by layer, but these layers are connected by knitting’s topologically interlocking stitch structure. So it can be easily unraveled and re-knitted, unlike other 3D printing methods that require laboriously melting down finished objects and re-spinning them into filament for recycling.”
“We’ve created a working prototype to automate solid knitting, a solid knitting machine, and a design tool to help program the machine,” he continued. “In the tool, users design objects by connecting different types of blocks, what we call ‘augmented stitch volumes.’ These are associated with pieces of code that represent machine operations described in ‘solid knitting,’ a language we developed. The tool combines the pieces of code from each block into a program to run the machine.”
Hirose believes this technique has a future for sturdy-knit tables, chairs and more, and there's huge room for creativity and adaptability because the designs can basically be disassembled by machine and transformed into something completely different.
“The concept may be hard to grasp,” said McCann, who leads the Carnegie Mellon Textiles Lab. “But it’s a very cool idea and has a lot of promise.”
The current prototype, the product of years of work, showcases its capabilities with thick elastic cord and, although it's “surprisingly sturdy,” according to McCann, it doesn't look like a very comfortable beanbag, for example.
Carnegie Mellon University
Hirose's goal was to create a sturdy weave of fine threads and fibers woven so closely together that they would appear more like hard materials.
“By making the yarn thinner, with increased resolution, it should be possible to use it for parts and components,” he told Japanese site InnoUvators.. “For example, most T-shirts in the world are knitted with fine yarn without feeling knitted. Likewise, I wanted to create a knitted product that looked sturdy like plastic, but could be unraveled, updated, and transformed into a different form in the future.”
The prototype can currently only knit solid shapes such as triangles or rectangles, but the goal is to create a machine that can be programmed to knit complex, finished objects such as chairs.
“We hope that other people will build their own robust knitting machines and come up with ideas that we haven’t explored yet,” McCann added.
The research was published in the journal ACM Graphics Transactions.
Source: Carnegie Mellon University