Electronic Textile Gaia: Ubiquitous Computational Substrates Across Geometric Scales

From in-body implantables to geotextiles and large-area spacecraft blankets, electronic fabric is now poised to operate across geometric scales that span many orders of magnitude, and thus across operational contexts with divergent material resiliency requirements, reaching far beyond the wearable device regime that is typically considered. This article reviews the key technical trends and lingering hurdles that are relevant to using functional fibers and e-textiles for operating at disparate scales—from microns to kilometers. We focus in particular on leveraging the unique material properties of a textile and the miniaturization of electronic devices in concert with the revolution in mass-manufacturing and digital fabrication technologies used to customize the device at the level of polymer, fiber, fabric, three-dimensional form, and system. We also offer a personal perspective on interdisciplinary collaboration between engineers, scientists, designers, and manufacturers for tackling some of the challenges in scaling and translation of electronic textiles.