Shortlisted for workplace design of the year at Dezeen Awards 2019, Robotic Needle Felting by Tsz Yan Ng, Wes McGee and Asa Peller explores an additive manufacturing technique for non-woven textiles.

The barbed needles punch through layers of material, entangling the fibres together. This process binds the material together seamlessly without the addition of sewn thread or chemical adhesives, making this technique a more environmentally friendly process. The project involves three areas of development; the tooling for robotic felting, the digital workflow that enables the formal and material properties to be specified computationally, and prototypes of architectural elements such as acoustic panels and furniture demonstrating different techniques and processes.

Designer: Tsz Yan Ng, Wes McGee and Asa Peller
Project: Robotic Needle Felting