We're delighted to announce that we have been awarded a "Pathways to Support Open-Source Ecosystems" Grant from the National Science Foundation. This "Phase 1" grant will support us in planning us a transition from AdaCAD as a project that we (the Unstable Design Lab) run to a project that engages a broader and more distributed community of weavers and engineers in its future development.

In this planning year, we will conduct interviews and develop community-engagement activities that will help us try out new directions for the future. The research we have done so far suggests should focus on making accessible tutorials, highlighting the unique capabilities of parametric design in the domain of weave drafting, and providing more opportunities for community engagement and support.

We'd like to thank you for sticking with us and AdaCAD so far. As a project in development, you have been working with us through multiple version, improvements, and interface changes. We appreciate the care and encouragement so many of you have provided and we are committed to working collectively to build something that celebrates woven patterning. If you have any thoughts or suggestions for us, you are always welcome to send them to unstabledesignlab@gmail.com.

Since making our beta release of AdaCAD 4.0 available almost one year ago, we have been testing it in various contexts, from classroom teaching, workshops, and within our own practice. This exploration has given rise to several new areas of focus and directions for the future of AdaCAD. As a result, we have taken on a dramatic new redesign the redesign that we have no released yet, but want to preview here to get your feedback. This new version will do 90% of the same things as the current stable version, but it includes new features and ways of representing the different design elements. This includes methods for loading and saving multiple files to an online directory, simulating your structures, and new operations for making playful algorithmic drafts (e.g. "glitch satin").

This is a screen shot of the new interface for the AdaCAD mixer, which emphasizes the relationship of operations in AdaCAD as similar to programming blocks (like those in Scratch), which can be arranged and connected to generate different results, shown in the view on the right. We see this view being ideal for people familiar with parametric design (but new to weaving) or complex weavers who are looking to manage multiple structures and relationships between structures. We aim for this view to emphasize playfulness while also opening pathways to document multi-layer or otherwise complex weave structures.

We offer two modes of working in AdaCAD 4.0, the first emphasizes traditional modes of draft making while the second emphasizes AdaCAD's parametric design functionality. This is the "Editor" view that allows one to specify different threading and treadling patterns for different loom configurations.

We'd love your feedback!​

As we said before, this new user interface is unreleased, and before we overwrite the current beta version, we'd like to know what you think. What new features would you love to see? What features should we make sure to keep? Any and all thoughts and feedback are welcome at unstabledesignlab@gmail.com.

This video shares more information on how we generated drafts to test the effectiveness of different structures for weaving dry electrodes, based on the research by Katya Arquilla. In Katya's research, she was interested in using weaving to create non-adhesive electrodes to monitor the electrical signals created by ones heart beat. With the guidance of the lab and a timely visit by Cathryn Amidei, Katya tested several structures for the electrodes, attempting to maximize contact with the skin using long floats, while reducing "noise" in the signal that would be created by the yarns moving. She tested the following structures: 1/15 sateen, 1/15 twill, 1/15 broken twill, and 1/15 birdseye structure, with both steel and silver yarns. She woven them on the lab's TC2, which is warped at 30 epi.

This image shows an overview of the patterns tested

Here is a detail of the twill variation, showing how the conductive yarns are integrated with the base yarns

The image above shows the detection rates of each swatch (how many heartbeats the electrodes could detect). This revealed that satin structures yeilded the most reliable detections, she reasoned this is because they can make good surfce contact with the skin. Her findings showed that "silver thread may be less prone than steel thread to detecting false positives, which is a benefit for using these electrodes in conjunction with an automated detection system." and "the silver thread integrated into the 1/15 sateen structure provided data that was only slightly noisier than data collected with adhesive electrodes on most subjects and able to produce the smaller parts of the ECG waveform that allow the measurement of HRV. We expected to see more differences between the patterns and we think one possibility for the small differences has to do with the size at which we tested. We suspect that testing larger sizes of each pattern would reveal more variability between the patterns." (quoting a draft in preparation).