AnimaTo: not your usual tea towel

Animating everyday textiles

Textiles are all around us in our living spaces, but they often go unnoticed. But what if textiles could change over time, adapting to our needs and routines? A new range of active materials can animate textiles, making them change over time. For example, imagine garments that adjust to fit your body or grow along with your children.

From textiles to Multimorphic Textile-forms

Multimorphic Textile-forms are textile products that can present multiple embedded states. For example, a flat piece of fabric produced on a loom with multiple overlapping layers can unfold and become a three-dimensional object, almost like an origami sculpture.

To investigate how our experiences might evolve over time with multimorphic textile-forms, we designed AnimaTo. After the ideation and prototyping phase in our labs, we wove AnimaTo on industrial jacquard looms by integrating an active yarn that reacts to water. At the beginning, AnimaTo looks and feels like an ordinary tea towel. In reality, AnimaTo is designed to evolve over two stages. First, when drying your hands or some dishes, AnimaTo gradually starts to change: some lines appear on its surface texture, its thickness increases, and its size becomes increasingly smaller. Second, after being washed, AnimaTo unfolds in a thin and very long cloth, three times as long as the original size. Is it still a tea towel? What has it become?

What textiles can become

AnimaTo invites designers to re-think how they conceptualise and design textiles. In particular, designers should encourage people to play a more active role in discovering what textiles ‘can do’ or ‘can become’ after the changes. By doing so, we could have more meaningful relationships with textile products, which can better fit and adapt to our everyday needs. We envision a future where garments, textile-based accessories and furniture serve multiple purposes, fostering deeper connections and longer-lasting products.