Looking Back to Look Forward

Join Brooks Hagan, associate professor in RISD’s Textiles department, for an exploration of 19th century French industrial textile samples. These pieces reveal processes that have all but vanished from contemporary textile design and manufacturing. As part of Repair and Design Futures, RISD’s Virtual Textile Research Group examined several of these samples utilizing the latest computer scanning technology as well as industrial and hand-based techniques to decipher the centuries-old textile constructions. These experiments involved adapting machinery and developing contemporary tools, including modeling software, to demonstrate the complexity of the archival fabric and aid in the development of new variants.
Free with admission.
Brooks Hagan is a textile designer, artist and researcher. He works with numerous firms such as Pallas Textiles and Mulberry Silk (India) and technology leaders such as Apple Inc. A current project with computer scientists at Cornell University and Stanford University investigates advanced visualization for the design of constructed textiles and is funded by a $1.2M grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). In 2015 Hagan cofounded the textile technology company Computational Textiles Inc.