Stitches and STEM

By Megan Chong

When I was about eight years old, my grandmother took me to a local fabric store to pick out a pattern for a dress we could sew together. Piecing together the brown pattern paper, cutting out fabric, and learning to pin and hem, I felt like I was solving the ultimate wearable puzzle.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was also preparing for my PhD in cell biophysics—the study of how cells, and the structures within them, move and grow. Cells form, and interact with, the squishy, stretchy template of our tissues, where they are always jostling and vying for space. When one cell contracts and gets smaller, its neighbors get pulled along, expanding to fill the space.

Life, it turns out, is another spatial puzzle to solve.

My thesis research rests on understanding how chromosomes, our coiled and packaged DNA, stretch and fold in the cell and what those shape changes tell us about the forces acting on them. On the surface, it is completely unrelated to the crafting I do to unwind—knitting scarves and hats, sewing crescent bags and pajama sets. But research shows that expertise in fiber arts—like sewing, knitting, crocheting, and even fabric dyeing—may help build the spatial intuition I’ve needed for my research.

The study of how we perceive objects in the physical world and infer details about their relationship to other objects in space is called spatial cognition or spatial reasoning.  The most well-studied of these skills are rigid mental rotations, which involve identifying a single object rotated in space. Mental rotations come in handy for architects, engineers, and plumbers, who need a good grasp of how parts fit together or how pieces will round a tight corner. They’re also valuable for chemists, who often have to visualize molecules too small to see from various angles to understand their structure.

Expertise in fiber arts—like sewing, knitting, crocheting, and even fabric dyeing—may help build the spatial intuition I’ve needed for my research.

Being good at rigid spatial reasoning doesn’t necessarily translate to success in other spatial tasks, many of which are less well studied. The nonrigid spatial reasoning skills of mental bending and folding ask us to imagine how an object would look after being deformed. This is important for understanding fluid dynamics—how liquids and gases move in space—which atmospheric scientists and oceanographers use to study how wind or water flow. Cell biophysicists like the scientists I work with measure the effects of similar flows. They ask how fluid moves through cells to create currents; how proteins bend, fold, and fit together to create a functional cellular machine; or, in my case, how chromosome stretching and folding signals to the cell whether it is correctly attached to the cell division machinery, which ensures future generations of cells will inherit all the right DNA.

I use some of the same science and engineering principles at my sewing table, to help visualize how swatches of fabric fit together to form a three-dimensional garment. Unlike simply slotting flat panels together to build a box, sewing a garment requires an understanding of how fabric drapes to fit around a body, how the shape of a pocket changes the way it bears weight, and how folding fabric before sewing can affect the final fit. Researchers have seen that students who performed better in apparel design courses also tended to score higher on some general spatial visualization tests.

Knitting, too, is a remarkable mechanical process. Taking a one-dimensional yarn that has little stretch or give on its own and winding it into a series of knots that can create a stretchy surface or even a three-dimensional tube is a feat of engineering. And the pliancy of the final product can change based on the pattern of stitches you use. Because of its flexibility and the versatility of patterns, knitting is perfect for crafting handheld versions of abstract math concepts, such as Klein bottles and other manifolds, and it helps students reason through tough geometry and calculus problems.

Because of its flexibility and the versatility of patterns, knitting is perfect for crafting handheld versions of abstract math concepts.

Mathematician and crafter Daina Taimina turned to another yarn-based craft, crocheting, to create the first physical model of a hyperbolic plane. Inspired by this breakthrough, the Crochet Coral Reef is an ongoing community art project that reflects on climate change and honors female labor and applied mathematics. By developing patterns that riff on Taimina’s original hyperbolic plane, crocheters collectively create a rich marine ecosystem and explore non-Euclidean geometric space in the process. Multiple studies have shown how incorporating crocheting programs improved students’ STEM learning and math achievements.

Continued practice of fiber arts staves off age-related decline in spatial reasoning. In knitting hats, crocheting amigurumi, and sewing jackets, artists gain an understanding of the world around them—and manage to keep it. Perhaps this understanding of the physical world is woven into textiles of all kinds. Spiders, master weavers, are thought by some observers to have “extended cognition” because of the way their webs help them understand the world. They are known to reinforce web areas that are particularly rich with prey, expand sections that haven’t been so fruitful, and adapt their web’s shape to its build site—essentially storing their life’s experience in the webs they weave.

Humans, too, have long stored memory in our fiber creations. The Inca and other ancient Andean cultures used quipus, fiber strings tied in a detailed knotting system, to record dates, census information, and even oral texts. Women in the ancient world wove classic Greek and Roman tales into tapestries, their creations a collective, social form of storytelling. A few years ago, a friend and I were inspired by the story quilts of Faith Ringgold to collaborate on one of our own. These textiles act as a physical representation of abstract knowledge, both in terms of the skill required to craft them and the cultural stories they record.

 These textiles act as a physical representation of abstract knowledge, both in terms of the skill required to craft them and the cultural stories they record.

Why do we persist in building walls or imagining chasms between art and science, instead of weaving them closer together? The ageism and sexism are hard to ignore. You won’t see fiber arts as a rich source for building spatial reasoning skills if you’re convinced crafting is mainly a light activity for elderly women. Especially given the common perception that men excel at both spatial reasoning and math, while women are not naturally skilled. Data suggest men do outperform women at some rigid spatial reasoning, but that idea doesn’t hold for many nonrigid tasks. Maybe a first step toward equity in STEM is to stop viewing spatial reasoning as an innate gift granted only to a select few and instead as a skill we can all learn like any other.

For me, craft has been a critical part of moving my research along. Even when I tired of the lab and retreated to my hobbies, my brain was hard at work building the intuition to confidently analyze and interpret the movies I took of living cells dividing themselves in two. The art of crafting connects the abstract, twisting ideas in my head to a concrete reality I can hold, and untangles some of the thornier ideas in the process.