Sharon Baurley

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design

Sharon is an AHRC-funded Research Fellow, based in the School of Fashion and Textile Design. She is developing the clothing concept, Communication-wear, that aims to augment the mobile phone by enabling expressive messages to be exchanged remotely, by conveying a sense/experience of touch and presence. By embedding communications technologies and smart textile systems into clothing, new and emotively-rich forms of remote communication/interaction could be enabled. Sharon is interested in the impact that smart textiles will have on the process of textile development and application design. She is also interested in the way people might appropriate technology, and in the interface between the world of human-computer interaction and conventions and cultures of clothing.

Smart textiles is not yet a discrete area. Its evolution will require input from a number of disparate sectors spanning science and technology, to design and the human sciences. Sharon coordinates an EPSRC-funded network: Smart Textiles for Intelligent Consumer Products , that aims to create new channels of communication between these disparate sectors.

She has consulted for Courtaulds Textiles, London, Gianni Versace, Milan, Marks & Spencer, London and Unilever, UK. She has conducted doctoral and post-doctoral research at the Royal College of Art, London, Musashino Art University, Tokyo and John Moores University, Liverpool developing new textile materials for clothing, through transferring technology from the technical textiles sector to design [3D textiles, holographic textiles]. Sharon has permanent exhibits in the Challenge of Materials Gallery, Science Museum, London, and has been awarded numerous national and international design awards including the Josef Otten Award for Technical Innovation and the Ideacomo Award for Printing and Dyeing, from the Japanese Fashion Foundation.

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