Last year, Electrolux Design Lab returned with another edition of its global competition for up-and-coming designers scouted from undergraduate and graduate programs. The theme was: healthy, happy kids; participants had to come up with ideas of smart home appliances that could improve children’s life in three areas – cooking, fabric care and air purifying. People’s choice was Weaver, a gadget that could repair and recolor any piece of clothing you own on the spot, using an app.
Larissa Trindade from Brazil came up with the idea of the smart orb: “Observing the relationship my little cousin had with his favourite superhero t-shirt, and how he got upset when this piece was damaged, I realized the emotional bond between kids and their clothes. Wondering how to solve this problem and laying on Biomimicry, I have found inspiration for Weaver. ”
Indeed, the repairing process was inspired by the way spiders make and reconstruct their webs and the way vegetable leather is made from ” green tea, sugar and bacteria”. But before Weaver starts repairing, it needs to recognize the fabric – here comes the app’s role. Once downloaded, you can select from the app option “textile repair”that uses scanning technology to recognize the cloth and generate an image. Then, the user highlights the problem area on the image and after a thorough analyze, the information is send to one half of the Weaver that takes care of “recovering”.
For “colour repair”, the process is similar, but the smart appliance sends pigments to the fabric. Parts for the Weaver could be aquired through the app and delivered at home. You would need a cartridge with biodegradable material for repairing, with a “regenerator enzymatic liquid inside” and four cartridges, under a CMYK system.
For now, it’s just a concept, but we would love to see that #objectmagic in action.
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