Frances Murphy
Democratising Design from the Domestic Sphere: Investigating 3D printing as a textile craft technology in the home.
Summary
Frances Murphy has a Masters in Textiles (2018) from the Royal Collge of Art. She is currently in the first year of her Part-time PhD research studies (2020) at the RCA. As a textile design practitioner and experience in creating luxury fashion fabrics, she looks to reinvent and develop new iterations of traditional textile processes, such as lace-making, embroidery, knit, and embellishments using a desktop 3D printer within a domestic sphere.
This practice-based research examines the introduction of 3DP textiles in the domestic sphere; A forever changing domestic three-dimensional space, where textile objects and digital matter collide. It explores textiles as a post-digital practice. Questioning can 3DP become an essential tool in domestic textile making and bridge the gap between traditional textile design and 3D printing technology. To analyse how existing craft communities collaborate and engage in textile craft-making online and how this could be implemented in a digital 3DP textile format, investigating the disconnect between the expectations of future 3DP in textiles and the reality in the 3DP textile making process. How would the availability of domestic 3DP textiles transform existing online methods of contemporary craft making? Could this technology be beneficial to external small business enterprises? Through her practice, she researches 3DP textile capabilities and investigates how domestic 3DP textiles could benefit the broader community in a commercial entity.
Additional info
She aims to investigate through qualitative research methods. The research will primarily be ethnographic and look at how 3DP textiles interact with textiles practitioners and the crafting community, mainly through practical observations, interviews and video documenting. The research would measure the affordance degree to evaluate the usability of the 3D printer for textiles and use of software systems like Illustrator, Photoshop and Tinkercad to textile communities. Enabling designers to manipulate, customise and hack textile software files with ease and seek to create affinity with the object and making process through digital frameworks. Comparing the sewing machine and 3D printer's, costs, usability and future social implications, social benefits, and disadvantages. Bridging the gap, to investigate 3D printed textiles from a textile designers perspective. Questioning, could 3DP textiles eliminate social and economic marginalisation and exclusion in our digital technological manufacturing and making society?
3D Printed Lace in the Domestic Sphere
