Abstract

Abstract: Fossilized Textiles. Trish Belford, University of Ulster, Belfast, Ruth Morrow, Queens University Belfast. This poster presents the current outcomes of an ongoing project, Tactility Factory (TF), which is a collaboration between a textile designer and an architect. Conceptually TF sets the utopian challenge of bringing together hard and soft materials (in the case of one product range girli concrete, ‘hard’ is represented by concrete and ‘soft’ by textile technologies) and it starts from an understanding that most Built Environment elements and materials are designed only to meet technical performance specifications. In contrast TF focuses as much on the human ‘performance’, (beauty, sensuality and in particular, tactility) as the technical.