Creating Furniture-Scale Deployable Objects with a Computer-Controlled Sewing Machine

A photograph of an end table, backpack, chair, and lamp fabricated using our process.

Abstract

We introduce a novel method for fabricating functional flat-to-shape objects using a large computer-controlled sewing machine (11 ft / 3.4m wide), a process that is both rapid and scalable beyond the machine's sewable area. Flat-to-shape deployable objects can allow for quick and easy need-based activation, but the selective flexibility required can involve complex fabrication or tedious assembly. In our method, we sandwich rigid form-defining materials, such as plywood and acrylic, between layers of fabric. The sewing process secures these layers together, creating soft hinges between the rigid inserts which allow the object to transition smoothly into its three-dimensional functional form with little post-processing.

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Citation

Sapna Tayal, Lea Albaugh, James McCann, and Scott E Hudson. 2025. Creating Furniture-Scale Deployable Objects with a Computer-Controlled Sewing Machine. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 438, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713735

@inproceedings{tayal:2025:deployable,
author = {Tayal, Sapna and Albaugh, Lea and McCann, James and Hudson, Scott E},
title = {Creating Furniture-Scale Deployable Objects with a Computer-Controlled Sewing Machine},
year = {2025},
isbn = {9798400713941},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713735},
doi = {10.1145/3706598.3713735},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {438},
numpages = {15},
series = {CHI '25},
}