by Madison Maxey, Founder and Technical Lead at LOOMIA

Electronic textiles, our core focus at LOOMIA, are a combination of two unlikely industries.

Along the same lines, our latest project mixes algorithms and textiles — another unlikely pair — with a data-driven dress created for the Near Future Summit.

Zem Jaoquin started the Near Future Summit in 2016 to convene “near futurists” — realistic, optimistic doers — around global issues with creative, cross-disciplinary solutions that can happen now. Autodesk and Near Future approached me about making a garment with this idea in mind and I was thrilled to take on the challenge.

We decided to work on an algorithm in Processing that would create a visual representing the spirit of the conference. I thought that a “Random Walk” was an appropriate concept to visualize. After all, the Near Future Summit is about moments of magic encountered on a “random walk”. The conference creates many serendipitous moments where opportunities intersect with amazing people, culminating in a big moment worth the exploration of “going on the walk”.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes a random walk:

“A random walk is a mathematical object, known as a stochastic or random process, that describes a path that consists of a succession of random steps on some mathematical space such as the integers.”

I love Autodesk and all of their tools, and wanted our visualization to be more than just a snaking line. With that in mind, I decided to use a Motif as an additional design element. I used Tinkercad to generate an interesting 2D geometry from a 3D form.