“We’re trying to make an all-fiber building,” says designer Felecia Davis, an associate professor of architecture and a lead researcher in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing at Pennsylvania State University. She is part of an interdisciplinary team testing how knitted materials, such as wool yarn, might function as the framing for a building while a mixture of straw and mycelium fungus embeds itself onto this knitted fabric to create the walls and the ceiling. It’s projects like this one that have cemented Davis as a star in computational textile design, a subset of the architecture and design field that uses technology — processors, sensors, actuators, cloud computing and networks — to develop new possibilities for soft materials. Davis is a triple threat designer: trained as both an architect and an engineer, and with a penchant for technology. In her Penn State lab and through her firm, Felecia Davis Studio, she mixes time-honored craft techniques and humble materials with the high-tech — so that clothing might, for instance, alert the wearer to excess carbon monoxide in the air or signal when an infant stops breathing in their crib. Head to the link in our bio to learn more about this textile expert. (📷: @rebecca_kiger)