Anne Louise Bang is an industrial Ph.D. scholar at the company Gabriel A/S and associated with Designskolen Kolding.

Her Ph.D. project is titled Anvendte tekstilers emotionelle værdier (The emotional values of applied textiles). One of the main goals of the project is to develop dialogue tools for involving users in the development of new products. These tools should facilitate communication about the sensual qualities of textiles that are the textile designers’ area of expertise. To a wide extent, however, this knowledge is intuitive and lacks a common, unambiguous terminology.

For Gabriel A/S the project is a natural response to a growing trend: For textile manufacturers to be competitive, it is not enough to produce high-quality, low-price textiles. The project is an element in the company’s strategic shift from producing fabric by the yard to offering comprehensive, complete solutions. Furthermore, the company finds that the contact with the research environment offers a source of new ideas and perspectives. Thus, for the involved employees at Gabriel A/S, the project is also a sort of additional training.

For the research and education environment at Designskolen Kolding the benefits of the project lie not least in the grounding that comes from being in touch with the everyday reality of industrial production. Sooner or later, most of the students are going to work in relation to industrial production, where practical usefulness and black figures on the bottom line inevitably take priority. Both industry and research need the knowledge the other has to offer, and they need to understand each other’s perspectives. Projects like this constitute one of the crucial lines of communication.

The main emphasis of the project is on the tactile qualities of the materials: How does the fabric feel? How do the users of the office chairs feel about the fabric? What sort of fabric is it pleasant to sit on 7-8 hours a day? Anne Louise Bang hopes to contribute to the development of methods for collecting this type of information in a form that is useful for designers and technicians involved in development processes.

The Ph.D. project was based on a pilot project funded by the Danish Centre for Design Research. In the project Anne Louise Bang also draws on her experience from experimental work as a textile designer and weaver – in her own studio since 1994 and as a member of the design group Textile Illusions.

Anne Louise Bang graduated as a textile designer from Designskolen Kolding, the Institute for One-Off Design, in 1994.

Anne Louise Bang’s Ph.D. project was described in an article in Mind Design No. 12, October 2008: Like Being Inside a Kaleidoscope.