As a lifelong knitter, I’ve been interested in how this technique for creating fabric can be used for more advanced purposes. We’ve published a few articles on this topic. For example, we wrote about how 3D knitting was used in the development of Nike’s FlyKnit shoe. We also wrote about the effort to bring knitting mills back to Brooklyn by Tailored Industry by leveraging 3D knitting to eliminate most of the labor-intensive finishing processes required with conventional knitting. And we have written about developments in wearables that use conductive materials to add functionality to fabrics, including the work being done at MIT on fiber computing.

I recently came across an interesting project underway at the MIT Media Lab: SensorKnits. It uses a combination of digital knitting machines—a highly programmable manufacturing process—with conductive yarn to programmatically control the resistance of knitted fabric. This short video highlights four applications the group identified as potential uses for their work:

There is also a more detailed journal paper available if you want to get down into the details.