Introduction: Back to the Future

At the Textile Society of America Biennial Symposium 2014 symposium, New Directions: Examining the Past, Creating the Future, I chaired a panel called “3C. Tech, Text, & Textiles.” Out of the papers and panelists present, two were invited to contribute to a special issue convened by Annin Barrett, Jeppe Emil Mogensen: Textiles and Space: The Experience of Textile Qualities in Hospital Interior Design, and Sandra Alfoldy: Cyber Comfort: Textiles as Markers of Care in Video Games. The authors have been joined by two further commissioned articles, Tincuta Heinzel: Reactive Architecture, Augmented Textiles, Domotics and Soft Architecture Fabrication: On Electronic and Reactive Textiles in Domestic Contexts, and Sarah E. Braddock Clarke: Outfitting Textiles, Fashion + Architecture: the Convergence + Interplay of Construction + Engineering for the Human Form.