Self-Cleaning Textiles

Self Cleaning Textiles Banner

This project explores how photocatalytic nanoparticles and light can be leveraged to clean (i.e., remove stains and kill bacteria) textiles. This project is a collaboration between the Living Matter Lab, Unstable Design Lab and Accenture Labs, which stemmed from Fiona Bell's summer internship. Accenture Labs has continued to partially fund the project, which has been published in CHI'21 and received the Inspiration award at TEI'21. While a functal self-cleaning textile that can be applied to public spaces is the end goal, this work currently focuses on how "deStaining" and "Undyeing" can be used as intentional design tools that can selectively degrade the color of organic stains on textiles.

Living Matter Lab


 

Associated Researchers

Publications

Fiona Bell, Alice Hong, Andreea Danielescu, Aditi Maheshwari, Ben Greenspan, Hiroshi Ishii, Laura Devendorf, and Mirela Alistar. 2021. "Self-deStaining Textiles: Designing Interactive Systems with Fabric, Stains and Light". In: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21). (Yokohama, Japan (virtual), May 8-13, 2021).

Fiona Bell. 2021. "The Undyeing Swatch". In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '21). (Salzburg, Austria (virtual), Feb. 14-19, 2021).