Laura Devendorf, our guest speaker for our class, was an absolute genius! Her software AdaCAD transforms the meaning of drafting into a playful activity. A very similar experience as the grasshopper, AdaCAD let you interact with your weave pattern in a way where it’s a poetic collaboration between your ideas, and the softwares ability to surprise you.
But before we jump into the details of what we performed, I would like to bring notice to Laura’s work in smart textiles, and creating a circuit using copper threads that transmit energy and stitch sensors into clothing, completely changing the meaning of clothing to be just a cover-all, or an attire. I definitely feel like that is definitely something to mull over as I move towards deciding my final piece, and also my MASD capstone. I am really looking forward to when we club the same with an Arduino!
As we began looking into AdaCAD, we realised how when we create a hand draft, it’s often tough to visualise how it would turn out to be, and much of our work is centered towards hand drawing the repeat structures. However, with AdaCAD, we could do a quick job of repeating a few squares, inputting some of the common patterns, and playing around with patterns that have already been created.
For my exploration with AdaCAD, I created one hand drawn pattern (yes you can draw your own too!!) and juxtaposed it with a pre-made pattern, creating slight tweaks to it to get an interesting mix.
AdaCAD is an easy-to-use software with clear labels to the functions one can perform. As a UX Designer, I can definitely identify some of the areas where the product could use upgrades in terms of making it more user friendly, but to see how Laura designed the software herself is truly remarkable!
For our assignments, we have been given two drafts to create, to be able to produce the same on a TC2 loom. I look forward to yielding interesting results with the patterns I’ve created (stay tuned for those!)
The TC2 Loom and its creation!
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