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By Alan Joch

Being a doormat can be a good thing

Jason Pollen stumbled into his new design process by accident. Two years ago, Pollen, the creator of fine-art textiles and chairman of the fiber department at the Kansas City Art Institute, organized a class trip to a local manufacturer of floor coverings to show his students how the company turned cotton into commercial products. During the tour, Pollen chanced upon the company’s 7-foot-wide, 40-foot-long industrial inkjet printing machine, which sprayed nylon-pile floor mats with permanent acid dyes—the same type of dye Pollen used in his work.

Jason Pollen (above) designs mats that are made with a digitally controlled printing process he discovered while touring a plant with his students.

The digitally controlled machine sported nozzles for 12 different colors and was capable of reproducing corporate logos and other complex design elements. Pollen’s fascination with the process was immediate. He began to picture possibilities for his own work. After convincing the company president to indulge his curiosity, “I spent a year hanging out at the plant and playing with new designs,” he says.

Architects and interior designers are beginning to use the mats in modern spaces; their durability and ease of maintenance are major selling points.

Unlike Barnes, Pollen doesn’t use custom-built software to automatically generate design options. Instead, he relies on combinations of off-the-shelf software like Photoshop, scanners, and digital control equipment that guides the inkjet printer he uses. Many of his early ideas came from physical objects he encounters in the natural world. In one case, he created a design for a floor mat called Taormina, named after the Italian seaside city, where he once found shards of glazed tile washed up on the beach. He scanned the multicolored shards into an image, edited the image in Photoshop, and ultimately developed three different variations on a basic pattern. Lately, Pollen is using a similar design process to produce a second line of mats made of a material he calls Pollenium, the rubber-mat backing with colored vinyl threads that are melted into it during the manufacturing process. The result is “a very elegant, hybrid product” without the nap of his original line, he says.

His floor mats have been springing up at museum gift shops and on the floors of contemporary interiors across the country. Pollen says he’s receiving particular interest from architects and interior designers who do “very contemporary designs, people who want to make a new statement.” Cary Goodman, FAIA, with the architectural firm Gould Evans Goodman Associates in Kansas City, says Pollen’s creations are as appealing for stone entryways as fine oriental carpets are for wood floors. “You just want to have the mats on your floor because they’re so beautiful,” he says.

Machine intelligence can’t replace know-how

Technology can’t increase a designer’s talent. Nor will digitally delivered designs replace the importance of feeling and touching a carpet or textile sample before putting it into large-scale production. Yet these case studies demonstrate the potential for technology to enable designers to be more productive and more exploratory in their everyday work. The end results—more choices, faster time to market—are welcome by-products of this evolution.

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