The Design Signals program thrives on collaboration. Design has always been closely connected to the worlds of industry and technology, not only in terms of technological advancements and innovation, but because all industries, places and people influence one another. With this year’s program and exhibition Woven Secrets, Design Signals embodies this inter-woven relationship.

Here, design becomes a tool for exploring the societal, technological, and environmental conditions of the present. This approach positions design not just as a way to create, but also as a lens through which we can observe and engage with the dynamics shaping Timișoara’s textile legacy—a legacy that, though at times invisible, remains deeply rooted in the city’s identity, economy, and cultural fabric.

As part of what we started with the Bright Cityscapes program and the exhibition Turn Signals – Design is not a Dashboard, both in 2023, Design Signals embodies our mission to bring design into dialogue with industrial history, local culture, emerging technologies and urgent contemporary issues. We have extended the inquiry initiated last year in Timișoara, which focused on the automotive industry, by examining another sector undergoing both preservation and transformation: Textiles. The industry’s historical role as a pioneer in automation and technology makes it a rich site for understanding how these systems have evolved—from handcrafting techniques to large-scale production and modern technological application, all performing in an age of global supply chains and vertiginous production demands.

Redefining Technology in Textiles

In curating Woven Secrets, we aimed to transcend a narrow focus on textiles, instead exploring how the industry relates to broader social and material systems. Our approach reflects a commitment to uncovering the layers of technology within textile production, which range from simple handcrafting to complex manufacturing processes. This method encourages designers and participants to think of technology not only as innovation or automation, but also as a critical means of connecting with past practices and envisioning future possibilities.

Historically, textile production set the stage for large-scale industrialisation, bridging the gap between handcraft and mechanisation. From the early loom punch cards—an ancestor of binary coding—to the intricate machines used today, textiles have been at the forefront of technological advancement. Our program questions how such technologies impact the lifecycle of materials, the interconnectedness of techniques, the geography of labour and the potentials and limits of contemporary factories to adapt and respond to political and economical changes.

As textiles become more “engineered,” they also become more challenging to access or reuse, thus revealing both the opportunities and limitations involved in innovation. This creates a space for designers to contribute in an age where rethinking values, supply chains and methods of production is central for responding to the global fast fashion phenomenon.

Cross-Generational and Neighbouring Design

A core aspect of Woven Secrets is its commitment to cross-generational engagement and community involvement. While industries and materials might evolve, they carry stories that bridge generations. The disappearance of large historical textile factories, one of which is neighbour to FABER (1 Iunie), created a substantial change in the life of the city and its citizens. The factory was a space of labour, but also represented an institution of everyday services, social life and gathering in the neighbourhood. During our research we wanted to acknowledge these changes and therefore a fundamental step was designing formats that enabled engagement with—and for—the neighbourhood and its inhabitants.

Through workshops, dialogues, and collaborations with former textile workers, we create a space where different voices—from seasoned professionals to young designers—intersect. These intergenerational exchanges are not just reflective; they’re vital for connecting the city’s industrial past with its current and future identity.

The Looming Workshop, for example, serves as both a platform for community engagement and a testament to the value of preserving traditional skills. Here, the community’s collective memory enriches the designers’ approach, grounding their work in the lived experience and technical knowledge of those who have shaped the industry. This participatory method of curation aims to transform the exhibition from a static display into a dynamic, evolving dialogue. It also creates the potential for new moments of gathering, as well as the building of a collective memory, through alternative spaces to those usually associated with industry, such as the factory.

Rethinking Locality and Global Systems

The factories operating in the Timișoara area represented a great point of departure for our design investigations. We started our field research through visits to factories and conversations with their managers and workers, through which we could understand the diverse values, methods and standards through which they operate, consequently creating a framework for collaboration within our program.

In designing Woven Secrets, we considered how the local textile industry interfaces with global supply chains, especially as Timișoara adapts to the demands of a changing economic landscape. The city’s textile sector has historically balanced local craftsmanship with global reach. However, fast fashion’s relentless pace has pressured this balance, pushing for accelerated production and distribution at the expense of quality and sustainability.

Through our program, designers are encouraged to question and confront the implications of these supply chains. Rather than being overwhelmed by the enormity of global production, they examine specific points within these networks where change may be possible. Their work presented in the final exhibition not only narrates possible interventions within the contemporary local industrial design discourse, but also allows for the inclusion of cultural production agents which are usually not present—such as the factories with which they collaborated. By starting at a local level and considering how these small actions might impact larger systems, designers, factories and the public begin to understand the profound ways in which design can affect both community and industry.

Curating Through Design Research and Prototyping Practices

As a curator with a background in design research, I approach Woven Secrets as a collaborative investigation. For me, curation is about creating spaces for multi-layered conversations and insights responding to contemporary design questions. My role is to assemble perspectives from diverse backgrounds, facilitating a dialogue that bridges the hyper-specialised knowledge of industry professionals with the expansive, integrative thinking of design. By fostering this exchange, the exhibition becomes a microcosm of Timișoara’s complex textile stories—narrated and experienced through materials, methods of making, and interactive media.

The multidisciplinary nature of Woven Secrets aligns with my philosophy that no question exists in isolation. To explore an industry as layered as textiles, we need input from various disciplines: textile manufacturing, engineering, economics, and storytelling. Each participant brings a unique viewpoint, whether it’s a factory worker’s experience or a young designer’s innovative approach to material reuse.

Together, these perspectives offer a holistic view of the industry’s past, present, and possible futures. In this specific exhibition, it was important for me to collaborate with designers towards the creation of a space for their practices to be propositive, through their observations and interaction with the local context. I like to look at the exhibition as a prototype of emerging design practices in which the practitioners are enabled to bring agency to their work, activating possible directions for the local design ecosystem of Timișoara through their material and visual stories. As part of Design Signals, Woven Secrets iterates the idea that designers should have a place within both the social and the economical discourses of the city and its futures.

Orality as a Design Tool

Orality as a condition for transmitting knowledge is woven within domestic practices, and this extends to the predominantly female labour spaces that textile production has always been a part of. Therefore, storytelling emerges as a vital design tool within Woven Secrets. The exhibition includes artefacts, oral histories, and multimedia installations that encapsulate the individual and collective stories of Timișoara’s textile industry. These narratives add depth to our understanding of the industry’s evolution, revealing the social, economic, and personal connections that shape it. This commitment to storytelling ensures that the industry’s history isn’t just archived but actively reimagined and reintegrated into contemporary discourse.

Incorporating diverse timelines and nonlinear storytelling, we engage audiences in a way that challenges the traditional, linear approach of many exhibitions. This allows us to honour the memories and experiences of the past while inviting new interpretations and future possibilities. Artefacts are accompanied with oral stories and collaboration with industries is contextualised through oral and visual storytelling methods. This book is also an attempt to collect and disseminate many of the conversations that emerged throughout the program through transcripts, translations, interviews and visual essays tracing the spaces, faces and landscapes that the participants encountered.

Toward a Sustainable Textile Future

Data visualisations, material explorations, prototypes for alternative production lines, natural colouring practices, imaginary playgrounds, collective memory testimonies, iterations of domestic practices, pedagogical utopian experimentations, technical expertise from workers, photographic reportage from a factory floor—they all come together in the exhibition, critically responding to the present of the textile industry starting from Timișoara—a nexus of the global textile market and related industries which is uncomfortably complex and largely unknown.

Hopefully, the insights generated through Woven Secrets go beyond the exhibition itself. By examining textiles as a technological and cultural practice, we hope to open conversations on how design can contribute to sustainability within the industry.

The question of fast fashion’s sustainability—or lack thereof—is central. Most participants in the program agree that fast fashion’s model is unsustainable, necessitating new approaches to production, distribution, and recycling. Through the program’s exploratory methods, designers investigate specific links in the supply chain where impactful change might be possible. They question how they might contribute to a future where the textile industry supports sustainable practices and strengthens local economies, rather than simply following global demands for speed and volume.

Designing Spaces for Collective Imagination

This book is the conclusive design iteration of this year’s Woven Secret project. It is the second book to come out of the Design Signals program at FABER, following the ‘Bright Cityscapes’ book published in 2023. The book ‘Woven Secrets’ is a collaborative effort of its own, serving as a repository of the knowledge we encountered, collected and generated along the process. A publication for presenting our questions, processes and outcomes along with an exploration of design media, strategies and practices.

Woven Secrets is not simply a look back at Timișoara’s textile industry; it’s a curatorial vision for how design can shape its future. Through our collective efforts—engaging students, designers, workers, researchers, and the local community—the project and its iterations serves as a space for reimagining what textiles can mean today and tomorrow. This project embodies design’s potential to observe, question, and transform, offering a blueprint for how we might integrate cultural heritage into sustainable practices.

As a part of Design Signals at FABER and this year in Woven Secrets, curation becomes a form of design practice, where each artefact, story, and interaction builds a multifaceted portrait of Timișoara’s industrial legacy. The dialogue initiated here invites us to consider how we interact with the past while constructing a more conscious, sustainable future for design as a discipline, as well as for the industry and the world.