Textiles are an essential part of our living spaces, yet they often go unnoticed. But what if textiles could evolve to meet our needs over time? This is the idea behind AnimaTo, a project that introduces a new generation of active materials capable of animating textiles. Imagine garments that adapt to your body size or fabrics that grow alongside your children. AnimaTo aims to reimagine how we design textiles, envisioning a future where textiles are multifunctional, fostering deeper emotional connections and encouraging longer product lifespans.

A Tea Towel that Transforms
AnimaTo challenges traditional notions of textiles, presenting an ordinary tea towel with extraordinary potential. Created using innovative multimorphic textile-forms, AnimaTo incorporates active yarns that allow it to transform its shape and functionality. The fabric evolves through two distinct stages: during use, while drying hands or dishes, its texture and thickness change, and its size decreases. After washing, AnimaTo expands into a long, thin cloth, three times its original length. This transformation prompts a simple yet profound question: is it still a tea towel, or has it become something entirely new?

The multimorphic textile-forms concept lies at the core of this project. These textiles present multiple embedded states, unfolding to create new forms or functions, much like an origami sculpture. This innovative approach enhances functionality and encourages users to form more meaningful relationships with their products, extending their usefulness.

Designing with Active Materials
To develop AnimaTo, the team conducted an ideation and prototyping phase before weaving the fabric on industrial Jacquard looms. By integrating an active yarn that reacts to water, they created a textile that changes in response to stimuli. This active material is crucial in rethinking how designers conceptualise textile products and invites a completely new way of engaging with fabrics.

AnimaTo exemplifies a future where textiles adapt to our needs, fostering a more interactive relationship between users and materials. By demonstrating the possibilities of textile transformation, AnimaTo opens new avenues for designing products that can serve multiple functions and evolve over time.

Inspiring a Shift in Design Thinking
AnimaTo invites designers across various disciplines—including interior design, fashion, and product design—to rethink the way textiles are conceived. The key idea is to leverage textiles’ unique temporal qualities to achieve multiplicity of use and extended product lifespans. By encouraging users to actively discover what textiles “can do” or “can become,” designers can foster deeper, more enduring connections with materials.

The goal is to inspire designers to think beyond the immediate function of a textile and instead explore its potential to change, grow, and evolve. This contributes to a more sustainable future where products are cherished for longer and waste is reduced through meaningful innovation.

Sustainability and Circularity
AnimaTo also aligns with key sustainability goals. By creating textiles that transform and serve multiple purposes, the project addresses issues of overconsumption and waste. Extending the lifespan of products through creative design reduces the need for constant replacement, ultimately contributing to a circular economy. The use of active, adaptable materials encourages the creation of textiles that are more than just disposable commodities, inviting a new way of thinking about resource use and product longevity.

AnimaTo encourages us to embrace textiles that serve more than one purpose, promoting both creativity and sustainability.

Source: 4TU.Design United
Photos: Alice Buso