Grijze Cellen | Slimme Stoffen

Self-repairing jeans, an invisibility cloak and clothes that can monitor and display our emotions. These things sound futuristic, magical even, but are not as far-fetched as you might think. During this Grijze Cellen, scientists and fashion designers talk about the point where technology, fashion and art meet: the development of smart textiles and the design of smart clothing. What is the state of the art and what will the future bring? Perhaps a better question is what textiles can do for us in the future. Can our magical fantasies become reality? And to what extent do we take undesirable applications into account?   

In this Gray Matter professor Lieva van Langenhove gives a lecture on smart textiles and physicist Vincent Ginis (VUB and Harvard) talks about (his) research on developing an invisibility cloak. Afterwards, we’ll have a conversation with both scientists.

In 1984 professor Lieva Van Langenhove (1961) graduated in textile engineering at Ghent University. For a couple of years she worked at the Belgian textile company UCO, after which she returned to Ghent University to work as a researcher at the Department of Textiles, where she obtained her doctorate in 1994. From 2000 onwards she’s been focusing her research particularly on developing smart textiles. Alongside her work at Ghent University, she participates in several national and European projects concerning smart textiles and biotechnology. Van Langenhove is also coordinator of SYSTEX, a European project focused on improving research on smart textiles and on developing wearable microsystems in Europe.

In 2014 physicist Vincent Ginis (1986) obtained his doctorate at the Faculty of Engineering. Now he’s a postdoctoral researcher connected to the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and Harvard University. He made several breakthroughs by making telecommunication faster and more economical. He also proved that particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, can be improved with his technique. Ginis wrote various international publications which had a huge impact and he won several prizes, including the Belgian Physical Society Young Scientist Award and the Solvay Award in 2015. The front page of Physical Review Letters was devoted twice to his research. Ginis is fascinated by the world of light and studies the interaction between light and nanostructured materials in an interdisciplinary way. Finally, he is involved with research on the invisibility cloak, a topic he will tell more about in his lecture.

Eef Lubbers graduated as an industrial designer at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. As a fashion designer she combines technology with textiles to add qualities such as movement, heat, colour change and light. In 2013 she was awarded the SYSTEX Student Award during the Smart Textiles Salon at the MIAT museum in Ghent for The Unlace, a bobbin laced body suit painted in thermochromic ink. Conductive thread is integrated in the garment so that when touched, the conductive thread heats up and changes the colour of the surrounding threads to skin colour. 

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