Devices that enable physical contact with the WINT design lab
The WINT Design Lab envisions, prototypes and designs regenerative futures devices and biofabrics that allow people to connect more with their bodies and break free from fossils materials which harm them and the environment. The studio works on objects (conceptual) that draw people back into their bodies and away from screens, synthetic feedback, materials that have no biological connection to the users who wear, touch and surround them. The story begins as industry produces materials that run almost entirely on fossil fuels, and the timeline for change is shorter and shorter than most people realize.
WINT Design Lab enters this setting. Their answer is: back to the body, back to biology. Their works use touch instead of screens, bio-based materials instead of petroleum-based materials, and technology that adapts to the person rather than requiring the person to adapt to it. In an imagined future where people are healthier, more present and not dependent on systems that poison the land they live in, the studio’s designs live as infrastructures that can connect us more to our physical and sensory sides, with the help of biosensors, physiotherapy devices, inflatable structures, bio-based textiles and even robotic paper folding.
regenerative clothing GOLD | all images courtesy of WINT Design Lab
Materials that work with human bodies, not against them
The thread that unites studio The creations of the WINT Design Lab so far are a belief that the materials and objects closest to the human body should work with it, not against it. One of the most direct expressions of this is AVA, a portable physiotherapy device developed with CPI Electronics and funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 initiative. For people recovering from muscle, ligament or bone injuries who are often sent home with exercises to do and unsupervised, getting them wrong can slow recovery, so treatment is extended.
AVA rings as a compact device that attaches to any part of the body and uses built-in machine learning to recognize if a movement is being performed correctly, then gives the user a vibrating signal or physical pulse for confirmation or correction. There is no screen or app involved in using it, as the therapist trains the device through movement, while the patient uses their body and the device communicates through touch. In a community where health care is distributed and accessible rather than centralized and expensive, this is what primary rehabilitation can look like: quiet, portable, and entirely focused on the person in recovery.
GOLD is a collagen-based fabric without any use of plastic
Tactile experience away from the digital world and screens
The body and the material world are the two spaces that WINT Design Lab continues to return to in their regenerative designs. On the body side, what they are building can connect a user to their own physical experience rather than remove them from it. Take Soft Interfaces, a lamp that responds to a stretched piece of fabric and requires no tap, no tap, just a hand press on a fabric surface that reads the pressure and changes the light accordingly. The liquid metal pathways embedded in this fabric have a melting point below room temperature, meaning they bend and stretch with the material without breaking the circuit.
The system reads the change in the cross-section of the track and translates it into a temperature or light intensity adjustment. Both AVA and Soft Interfaces point to the idea that objects around people speak body language, be it touch, pressure, movement, rather than requiring people to rely on a screen and what it projects to them. There is a physical and physical interaction that innovative technologies seem to avoid over time as they become more oriented towards the speed of a processor or a click on a glass surface.
the studio made a demo jacket out of cow gut tissue using robotic placement and thread lamination
WINT Design Lab also shifts from the feel of objects to what they are made of and where they go after use. GOLD, the collagen-based textile project developed with Mimotype, made a demonstration jacket from cow intestine tissue using robotic threading and lamination, which is a biodegradable material separated from chemical-free fiber composites that acts as a waterproof outer layer for arctic conditions. The Fiber Futures exhibition at the 2024 London Design Festival allowed the studio to bring that same material need to the fore, as it showcased five years of research into bio-based alternatives to petroleum-derived synthetic fibres, which make up 91 per cent of all man-made textiles and are expected to account for 26 per cent of CO20 emissions.
Then there’s ARA, a project that explores air as a building material, using parametric folding patterns derived from biological systems to create inflatable structures that adapt and protect without rigid frames or wasted material. These projects help to imagine and curate a community where the objects people touch respond to their bodies, where the clothes they wear return to the earth when they wear out, where structures adapt to conditions rather than fight them, and where production is done close to the person who needs the object rather than in a global supply chain. In this case, this community is not an idea, but the accumulation of what WINT Design Lab has already begun to build, one prototype at a time.
view of Soft Interfaces liquid metal technology
Soft Interfaces is a lamp that responds to a stretched piece of fabric
users press the surface fabric to interact with the device
