Fraying Certainty: Material Degradation as an Uncertainty Channel in Woven Textile Visualization

Authors

Stephen Brooks (Dalhousie University)

Keywords

Uncertainty visualization, data physicalization, textile visualization, material degradation, materiality, design vocabulary.

Abstract

Woven artifacts communicate through more than printed or stitched marks: dye saturation, yarn integrity, weave density, thread path, interlacement, and surface relief all shape what can be seen. This paper asks whether controlled changes to those material properties can communicate uncertainty as part of the artifact itself. We develop a vocabulary comprising faded dye, thinning weave, fraying, pulled threads, and puckering. Their consequences for reading fall into four categories: loss of visible support, dispersion of detail, displacement of position, and production of spurious structure. These categories correspond to suppressive, diffusive, displacive, and generative effects, respectively. Unravelling junctions are treated separately as a possible means of expressing uncertainty about relations. The analysis highlights both potential mappings and textile-specific hazards, including associations with age, damage, care, neglect, repair, and decay. The contribution is a conceptual framework and evaluation agenda but the proposed operations have not yet been established as perceptually calibrated uncertainty encodings.