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A new materials technique has blended the usefulness of knitting needles and yarn with cutting-edge technology to create the equipment and process to make a solid-knit object of almost any kind. Yuichi Hirose first dreamed up this technique when he was a student at Keio University in Tokyo. There, working on digital fabrication methods in the Hiroya Tanaka Laboratory, he had the idea to incorporate knitting into a new kind of manufacturing. He is now working on making it a reality with his research team, led by James McCannnow, at Carnegie Mellon University.
What he calls “solid knitting” is indeed “solid,” with the possibility of manufacturing whole furniture sets, as well as the fabrics that cover them. What’s more, the end product can be unraveled to use again in a completely different form, making it sustainable, versatile and a fun challenge to imagine how to reconfige any structure.
“To automate solid knitting, we built a working prototype, solid-knitting machine, and a design tool to help program the machine,” Hirose says. “In the tool, users design objects by connecting different types of blocks, what we call ‘augmented stitch volumes.’ They are associated with code fragments that represent machine operations, described in a language we also developed, ‘solid knitout.’ The tool combines the code fragments from each block into a program to run the machine.”
Currently, the prototype can knit triangular or rectangular solid shapes, but the goal is to create a machine that can be programmed to knit more complex, complete objects. Hirose’s intends to eventually be able to solid-knit thin thread and fibers, which would be woven so closely together that they’d appear more like hard materials.
“By making the thread thinner, when the resolution increases, it should be possible to use it for parts and components,” he told the Japanese site InnoUvators.
The prototype of the solid knitting machine made its debut recently at the annual SIGGRAPH conference showcasing computer graphics and interactive techniques, where it won an honorable mention in the Best Paper category. The research is published in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics.