Engineered Textiles, Digital Stories Explored in Upcoming Florida Institute of Technology Lectures
By Adam Lowenstein, FIT News Bureau // March 22, 2018
Friends of Textiles Lecture Series
BREVARD COUNTY • MELBOURNE, FLORIDA — British designer Amy Congdon will be the focus of the first of two spring events in Florida Institute of Technology’s Friends of Textiles Lecture Series.
Congdon will present, “Tissue Engineered Textiles” on Tuesday, March 27, in the Digital Scholarship Lab at Evans Library. The event begins with a reception at 5:15 p.m., followed by the lecture at 6 p.m.
At 11 a.m. on March 27, exclusively for Florida Tech students, staff and faculty, Congdon will lead a free gallery tour of her work now on display as part of the Coded Couture exhibition at the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts on the Florida Tech campus.
Congdon is a designer, researcher and critical thinker who explores the boundaries between design, science and technology. In her research, Congdon investigates the crossovers between textile craft and tissue engineering through a highly experimental practice.
She has worked within laboratories such as the Tissue Engineering & Biophotonics Department at Kings College London and SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia.
Congdon has exhibited her work internationally in venues such as Somerset House UK, Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York City, Espace Fondation EDF in Paris, Salone De Mobile Milan, The National Centre for Craft and Design UK, and the Victoria and Albert Museum London. Her work has been featured in publications including WIRED, Motherboard and Vogue, and in books such as Biodesign by William Myers and Biomimicry for Designers by Veronika Kapsali.
In 2016, Congdon was named a “Leading Innovator” by the UK Craft Council. She is currently based in New York, where she works for the synthetic biology start-up Modern Meadow as team lead for materials design.
Computational Craft: Digital Stories in Physical Spaces
In the second lecture of the spring series, Anne Sullivan will offer, “Computational Craft: Digital Stories in Physical Spaces” starting at 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 10, in the Denius Student Center’s second-floor Hartley Room on the Florida Tech campus. The lecture will be preceded by a reception at 5:15 p.m.
Sullivan is an assistant professor of digital media in the School of Visual Arts & Design at the University of Central Florida. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from University of California Santa Cruz and was a co-founder of Play Crafts, a company that designed online tools for crafters.
Sullivan is the concept designer and producer of Loominary, a collaborative game system that uses a tabletop loom as the controller. As the player progresses through the game, the player’s choices for the characters are literally woven into a personalized, tangible artifact of the player’s gaming session.
The system is part of a research agenda with projects that focus on creating frameworks to support new storytelling experiences from underrepresented perspectives.
For both Friends of Textiles lectures, the Ruth Funk Center will remain open until 5 p.m., one hour later than normal.
The cost for the evening lectures is $10 each for the general public and free for Friends of Textiles members and full-time Florida Tech students, faculty and staff with Florida Tech ID. Reservations are not necessary but encouraged. Guests may call 321-674-6129 or email textiles@fit.edu.
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