In the context of the circular economy, materials in scientific development present opportunities for material design processes that begin at a raw state, before being introduced into established processes and applications. The common separation of the scientific development of materials from design intervention results in a lack of methodological approaches enabling designers to inform new processes that respond to new material properties. This paper presents the results of a PhD investigation that led to the development and application of a Material-Driven Textile Design (MDTD) methodology for design research based in the materials science laboratory. It also presents the development of the fabrication of a textile composite with regenerated cellulose obtained from waste textiles, resulting from the MDTD methodology informing novel textile processes. The methods and practice which make up this methodology include distinct phases of exploration, translation and activation, and were developed via three design-led research residencies in materials science laboratories in Europe. The MDTD methodology proposes an approach to design research in a scientific setting that is decoupled from a specific product or application in order to lift disciplinary boundaries for the development of circular material-driven fabrication and finishing processes at the intersection of materials science and design.

The need for circular textiles has led to an interest in the production of biologically derived materials, generating new research into the bioproduction of textiles through design and interdisciplinary approaches. Bacterial cellulose has been produced directly from fermentation into sheets but not yet investigated in terms of producing filaments directly from fermentation. This leaves a wealth of material qualities unexplored. Further, by growing the material directly into filaments, production such as wet spinning are made redundant, thus reducing textile manufacturing steps. The aim of this study was to grow the bio-material, namely bacterial cellulose directly into a filament. This was achieved using a method of co-designing with the characteristics of biological materials. The method combines approaches of material-driven textile design and human-centred co-design to investigate co-designing with the characteristics of living materials for biological material production. The project is part of a wider exploration of bio-manufacturing textiles from waste. The practice-based approach brought together biological sciences and material design through a series of iterative experiments. This, in turn, resulted in designing with the inherent characteristics of bacterial cellulose, and by doing so filaments were designed to be fabricated directly from fermentation. In this investigation, creative exploration was encouraged within a biological laboratory space, showing how interdisciplinary collaboration can offer innovative alternative bioproduction routes for textile filament production.

Materials science breakthroughs have regenerated high value fibres from end-of-life cellulose-based textiles that can be introduced into existing textile fabrication processes from raw material to textile product in established textile value chains. Scientific developments with regenerated cellulose fibres obtained from waste textiles suggest their potential to replace virgin resources. The current scale-up of regeneration technologies for end-of-life cellulose-based textiles towards pilot and commercial scales can potentially achieve a future materials circularity, but there is a lack of a long-term view of the properties of materials after consecutive recycling stages take place. Cellulose-based materials cannot be infinitely recycled and maintain the same quality, a factor which may provide new challenges for future textile processes in the context of the circular bioeconomy. This paper maps collaborative design and materials science projects that use regenerated cellulose obtained from waste feedstock according to materials in the value chain they seek to substitute. It also presents four new processes that use regenerated cellulose materials in relation to their intervention in the value chain (as determined in a PhD investigation). A framework is presented to demonstrate how these circular material design processes take place at earlier stages of the textile value chain after subsequent regeneration stages.

This paper presents a textile design and materials science collaboration during two design residencies in a materials science laboratory for regenerated cellulose research. The first residency evidenced that both disciplines are connected through a materials practice in communication and production of materials. This paper presents the aims of design and scientific research in materials experimentation and the scale of materials in each discipline. The cross-disciplinary collaboration developed transdisciplinary methods for textile design and materials science towards circularity of materials in a bioeconomy. A model for material affinity highlights these two new approaches between the design vision of the textiles designer and scientific method in materials science: validation and visualization. The collaboration led to establishing cellulose-based films as a process that can be made in both the design studio and the science laboratory. This paper presents how textile design prototyping in the materials science laboratory during the second residency was informed by scientific method in a transdisciplinary method of validation. Scientific communication of research is here presented as adopting visualization methods from design. Translation is presented as a term for the design-science material experiments taking place in the science laboratory in the collaboration between the authors. Improved communication between technical scientists and textile designers is needed to achieve circularity of regenerated cellulose materials in the emerging bioeconomy. This paper addresses translation as a process taking place during textile design residencies in the material science laboratory. The material experiments improved cross-disciplinary communication at the convergence of scientific method, design vision, visualization and validation processes.