While a student at CSW, Sydney Keller ’20 (www.sydneykeller.com) sought to make an impact on campus by advocating for better accessibility to the buildings and grounds for community members with mobility challenges. As part of these efforts, Sydney facilitated a pro bono audit by an accessibility professional and led efforts to improve safety and access for campus buildings and grounds. This past May, she graduated from Wesleyan University where she created her own major in Computational Design with a focus on design for disability. At Wesleyan, Sydney was recognized with High Honors for her senior thesis, “How Do You Wear?” which explores the impacts of adaptive devices on clothing, examining disability not only through a medical lens, but also through a social one, offering innovative solutions to an all-too-common problem: the premature breakdown of clothing fibers from adaptive devices.

This issue is a personal one to Sydney, who was born with a vascular malformation, which has required the use of forearm crutches for most of her life. “It’s shaped how I move through the world — and how the world, and my clothing, moves against me,” she says.

Over the course of her life, Sydney has found that her forearm crutches create friction and wear on her clothing, leaving her with the burden of patching, hiding, or replacing clothing.

“These wear patterns become silent markers that we’re not moving through the world in the ‘normal’ way,” Sydney says, adding “That kind of visibility can feel vulnerable.”

So she asked the questions: What if wear could be designed into the garment? and What if the inevitable breakdown became an opportunity rather than a disappointment?

Knowing that she would need funding and garments to work with, Sydney reached out to the Senior Director of Sustainability & Sourcing at Everlane, a popular clothing brand known for using ethically sourced, 100% natural materials. The company would become a primary sponsor of her work.

Realizing that this experience of hyper degradation was shared by many other physically disabled individuals, Sydney co-designed with fellow disabled students to create personalized solutions: reinforcing worn areas with 3D-printed patches that remain hidden until wear reveals them and decorating worn areas with embroidered “galaxy” motifs reflecting identity and narrative. She began researching and experimenting with thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), to develop 3D-printed textiles to create custom patches designed to withstand wear, with the ability to integrate embroidery for added padding and personalization.

As her next step, Sydney sought to translate her solutions to a larger audience, investigating ways an organization might be able to implement her reinforcement strategies into the manufacturing process. To do this, she applied her computational fabrication knowledge. She learned  to use the knitting machines in Wesleyan’s robotics lab, discovering more efficient ways to insert TPU into the garments she was creating, providing a proof-of-concept for manufacturing these garments

Sydney’s final work was installed in Wesleyan’s Zilkha Gallery. It featured interactive garment displays, body-mapping sculptures, and 48 printed “squares” showing textile experimentation. The installation prompted viewers to rethink assumptions around normalcy and the body as well as  disability and to see it not as something to be hidden, but as a design opportunity and an alternative means of creative expression.