Discover 4

April 2018^ DISCOVER^59

like patterns woven into the fabric; an ordinary iPhone
camera can scan the pack from across a room to bring up
information, like a quote or a song, through a program
the wearer can enable and use with a phone. He also shows
off baseball caps woven with diodes that sense signals
from overhead lights. The signals are sent by flickering
the lighting more quickly than our eyes can perceive — a
system that could help future wearers navigate disorienting
buildings like hospitals and airports.
Toward the end of his presentation, Fink shows
an organizational chart representing the design and
production trajectory for his navigational baseball cap.
Specialized threads, with technology from MIT, could be
modeled and drawn at AFFOA. Textiles could be spun
at Inman Mills in South Carolina. AmeriCap in North
Carolina should be able to assemble those textiles into
hats. And systems integration with the lighting could take
place in the AFFOA prototyping facility, in collaboration
with Massachusetts-based Analog Devices.
“Most university intellectual property is sitting on
a shelf,” Fink explains. “And the reason is there’s a gap
between where research ends and production begins.”
With AFFOA and its approach to projects like these, the
gap is eliminated.
“Functional fabric is one of the most transdisciplinary
fields of our time,” says Genevieve Dion, director of
the Shima Seiki Haute Technology Laboratory and

an AFFOA leader at Drexel University. She and Fink

crossed paths while attending a meeting that would lead

to AFFOA, which benefits from her background in fash-

ion. She, in turn, has brought her sociology colleagues

on board. As groundbreaking as the materials coming

out of Fink’s lab may be, Dion believes their adoption

will depend on addressing real human needs in ways that

people find appealing, issues that are more readily taken

up by designers and sociologists than engineers. “We have

to get beyond, ‘Let’s make Google Glass. It will be so cool

that everyone will want it,’ ” she says.

For Dion, the obvious place to start using functional

fibers and fabrics is in health care, especially for people

with conditions that need constant monitoring and treat-

ment. Functional fabrics might not only provide better

support, but they could also eliminate the stigma of

looking different. “We’ll be successful with wearable tech-

nology as medical devices when nobody can tell you’re

wearing them,” she says.

Characteristically expansive, Fink carries Dion’s vision

into all domains. His conversation spans from T-shirts to

diapers. “People ask, how’s this fabric going to look?” he

says. “Actually it’s not going to look any different. But it’s

going to do a whole lot more.”^ D

Jonathon Keats is a contributing editor for Discover and the author

of You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future.

This computerized loom machine at the AFFOA lab in Cambridge can weave functional fibers into fabrics like this, which is part of a project

to create so-called programmable backpacks for college students.