Barbro Scholz

Cofounder Stühmer|Scholz Design Office Germany

Barbro Scholz

Cofounder Stühmer|Scholz Design Office Germany

Biography

Barbro Scholz is an artist and textile designer. She has a background in design with a focus on electronic textiles and interaction, her interest is in the impact of designed objects on society, especially textiles as user interfaces for technical devices or as the device itself. She thinks the change of possibilities in material choices and size for devices raise new questions to designers. She believes that the designer’s visionary role becomes even more important as well as the responsibility of designers to raise questions. From 2010 to 2012 she was involved in the Smart Textiles Design Lab at the Swedish School of Textiles, since 2012 she works together with Esther Stühmer in the Stühmer|Scholz Design Office in Hamburg, Germany.


Your Balance - What could be the role of textile user interfaces in the digital age?

Your Balance is an interactive, textile jewelry with the inspiration taken from insects. It is a critical design project that deals with the control through the 24/7 availability and the expectation of efficient time-use we live with today. It questions our passive acceptance of applications of control in our daily life and asks what we want textile user interfaces to be. The three textile sensors monitor the movements of the employee to a system, watched by the employer to control the employee’s life balance. Communication between employer and employee becomes closer, the amount of work and responsibilities can be adjusted according to the data and long-term efficiency is provided. Are we like worker-bees, working efficiently towards the center of the hive?
Materials: Bobbin-Lace of Monofilament, Silver-Thread, and Bekinox-Thread; Magnets.