Weaving holds far more design potential than current industrial practice suggests. Most automated looms were developed for mass-producing flat, simple fabrics — and this has quietly narrowed what designers, engineers, and researchers imagine weaving can do. Three-dimensional textile-forms, animated and shape-changing structures, smart and living materials, zero waste and on-demand manufacturing: these possibilities exist, but there has been no shared language or framework for exploring them systematically.

This research developed a comprehensive design space for woven textile-forms, mapping the variables available to designers across four dimensions: Material Process (the motions of the loom), Material Ingredients (yarns and materials), Material Structure (how materials are arranged and interlaced), and Material Form (how three-dimensional form is translated into a weavable structure). The design space is not a decision tree or an exhaustive list — it is a living resource that evolves as new technologies, materials, and methods emerge.

Animated Shuttle-woven Textile-forms

The design space was developed in part through a design case: animated three-dimensional woven trousers produced using shuttle weaving on a TC2 loom. Shuttle weaving — in which a continuous weft thread is carried back and forth across the loom, including in partial-width insertions — offers unique possibilities that shuttleless industrial weaving cannot: localised material placement, seamless folds between layers, self-finished selvedges in the middle of a fabric, and the ability to embed animated or shape-changing materials precisely where they are needed.

The resulting trouser prototype combines heat-shrinking yarns placed in specific zones to allow the wearer to shrink the waistband and trouser legs to fit, with a removable clasping thread that can be pulled out to change the fit or silhouette entirely. The textile-form comes off the loom requiring minimal finishing — no cutting, almost no sewing — and generates no fabric waste.

A Toolkit for Exploring the Design Space

The design space also forms the foundation for a physical toolkit developed with academic and industry-based designers through workshops and focus group discussions. The toolkit brings together a card deck and canvas that externalise and interrogate existing assumptions about weaving, and a modified frame loom that enables hands-on exploration of new possibilities. It offers both analytical and making-based routes into unconventional textile design — combining critical reflection on production systems with direct material experimentation, and providing a shared vocabulary across disciplines.

Developed through Milou Voorwinden’s ongoing PhD, with Alice Buso, Savanne Klop, and Elvin Karana.