View the ongoing activities, events, and applied research emerging from RAU, and explore the practical dimensions of contemporary textile inquiry and innovation.

A soft launch for the new RAU Textiles Facility!   Semester Two in the School of Art and Design is in full swing this week, and the RAU Textiles Facility has been humming with activity as students officially fill the new space for the first time. Finn and Dan have been busy inducting students from across the School  — including Fashion, Experimental Surfaces, Spatial, Visual Arts, and Postgrad — into the RAU Facility processes, and welcoming our regular users back into the fold. We can't wait to see their designs, ideas and experiments unfold over the coming weeks.  

We were excited to share the RAU facility this week with our fantastic colleagues across the Art & Design labs (including the 3D Fabrication, Wet Lab, Digifab, and Bindery), who came to visit ahead of the facility officially opening to students with the start of Semester Two.   

AUT recently welcomed students from our Iti Kōpara Schools Partnership Programme. 70 Year 11 tauira from across 7 schools in Tāmaki Makaurau visited to take a look around the City Campus, including spending a morning with the RAU Textiles team learning about our textiles facilities and having a go with the felting loom.

To celebrate Matariki through the Karangahape Road kaupapa Whāia Te Waiora, RAU hosted two small-loom weaving sessions at Open Coffee. Guided by Dan Collings, guests were invited to sit together and connect, learning to weave through craft and conversation.

Throughout the month of June, Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery hosted a series of graduate exhibitions from the School of Art and Design masters programmes. The first round focused on the Master of Design, showcasing a diverse range of disciplines — including spatial, fashion, animation, visual effects, game, communication, and interaction design. RAU postgraduate researcher Xinhan Zhang's masters project, Feeling of Being - A Woven Home, was included in the exhibition. Image from the installation of Xinhan's final collection: The Woven Home, photographed by Paul Chapman.  

To support the Objectspace exhibition PUPURITIA (curated by Melanie Tangaere Baldwin), RAU researcher Arielle Walker led a hands-on workshop session, sharing the fundamentals of weaving on a mini loom. Inspired by the PUPURITIA themes, the workshop invited space for storytelling, shared making, and connection through textiles. Designed and crafted by RAU with the support of AUT's Digital Fabrication Lab, each mini loom is pocket-sized for making-in-place.  

Surface Design Journal Spring 2025 issue

In their 2025 felting issue's Spotlight on Education, Surface Design Journal shared "Felting Futures," a paper by RAU researchers Jyoti Kalyanji, Dan Collings, and Finn Godbolt: “Against this backdrop, industrial design students at Auckland University of Technology in Aotearoa, New Zealand are introduced to digital felting as part of a suite of technologies in a textiles research facility. The felt loom is presented as an additive fabrication technology, and locally sourced wool fibre as a key ingredient. Responding to the need for increased consideration of the materials we choose to work with and the environmental and social impact of both their production and their life cycle of use, students are encouraged to engage with hands-on material explorations. ” 

CTANZ Symposium 2025 

RAU researchers Dan Collings, Rachelle Moore, and Arielle Walker presented papers at the 2025 CTANZ Symposium: Fascination, in Ōtepoti this May.  

Dan shared trompe-l’oeil techniques within digital knit textiles as a means of challenging Western gender associations. Rachelle discussed her grandmother Marj Moore’s private museum collection, and the narratives embedded within the garments and textiles held by the family since the early 1900s. Arielle shared insights into how her practice combines textile traditions from her Nana’s lace-making (and other textile samplers) with fibre techniques from throughout her ancestral lines.  

The symposium was a fantastic opportunity to connect with a network of makers and researchers around all things textile, enjoying a depth of presentations that ranged from the historical to contemporary across theory and practice.  

27th Annual IFFTI Conference 

RAU researchers Finn Godbolt and Daniel Collings were in London to present papers at the recent IFFTI Conference, Forming Futures.  

Finn shared his insights into ways that analysis of historical dress can expand opportunities for ornamentation in menswear through digital knitting practices. Dan discussed textile design approaches that challenge binary gender assumptions of contemporary Western fashion, supporting a truer spectrum of self-expression. The two also presented findings from a recent RAU research collaboration, exploring interdisciplinary approaches to improve the wearability of next-to-skin e-textile applications. This research was undertaken by Finn Godbolt, Daniel Collings, Andrew Lowry, Jyoti Kalyanji, Andrew Lowe. 

The conference was a great chance to connect with the London College of Fashion, and with international researchers across a broad range of context and practice through the IFFTI network.