Aural Textiles: Beyond Visual Pattern Making

Co-creation describes a process of bringing customer and creator together to produce items of mutual value, allowing the design aspect of production to sit between customer and creator. A major step-change enabling such a process is the ability to link consumer design inspiration with pattern creation software linked to manufacturing equipment. One aspect of supporting such a process includes fashioning tractable methods to collect and manipulate "design inspiration" that a customer can input into and that are amenable to the application of computer-based production. Here we describe research in progress exploring the use of "data-driven designs" that challenge the existing visual bias of textile design, using the Scottish context as an example; and offer up a process by which these explorations can be transformed towards a customer-creator model: transforming bioacoustics data recorded from the soundscape into woven, knitted, printed or embroidered textiles.