Lori Weitzner Presents Project to Textile Design Students

This semester, students in the graduate Textile Design program are being challanged to design innovative wall coverings for the Lori Weitzner Design line.

Yesterday Lori presented the project to the students which will involve working with one of the following briefs -

1. Material Connection:

This category is about using unexpected materials to create a textile. This could mean anything from incorporating thermo-plastics to sourcing and re-purposing a recycled material in the vein of our best-selling wallcovering, Newsworthy, which is made of hand-woven strips of newspaper. The idea is to move beyond the usual gamut of fibers (cotton, linen, viscose, etc) to create a product which functions as well as a "traditional" fabric or wallcovering, but offers something new aesthetically.

2. Inside Out:

This category is about designing a textile from the inside out, engineering a fabric or wallcovering on a molecular or structural level to achieve some kind of functional property (like a fabric that blocks radiation or a wallcovering that absorbs sound). While aesthetics are still important, the actual technology that goes into the textile and the resulting function are paramount in this category.

3. Two-way street:

One of our best-selling wallcoverings is Magnetism, the ingenuous pairing of basic linen with a magnetic receptive backing. The result is a wallcovering that is as elegant as any other Weitzner product, and also functional. Now we ask you to consider the next step: a textile that can interact with or respond to the user, just as the user can interact with and respond to it. The result would be a truly interactive textile, a product.

This is a special project under the University's DEC (Design, Engineering & Commerce) extra curriculum. It is conducted as a collaborative project involving students in Textile Design, Industrial Design, Textile Engineering, Fashion Industry Management, Engineering and Business. Each Textile Design graduate student is assigned as the PI (primary Investigator) and will individually form a design team with collaborators in the other majors.

Next week, students will visit the design studios of Lori Weitzner and her recent partner Mark Pollack before launching into this project.