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The E-Textile Swatch Exchange is a platform for sharing physical work samples in the field of electronic textiles. The exchange wishes to emphasize the importance of physicality and quality workmanship in an increasingly digital world. Individuals and collaborative efforts participate in the exchange by submitting a unique swatch design of their own, and in turn receive a compiled collection of everybody else's swatches. This means that everybody participating needs to make as many multiples of their swatch as the total number of participants. There are no guidelines defining what the swatches could or should be, only that they relate to the field of E-Textiles.

A transdisciplinary collaborative journey leading to sensorial clothingRecent science funding initiatives have enabled participants from a diverse array of disciplines to engage in common spaces for developing solutions for new wearables. These initiatives include collaborations between the arts and sciences, fields which have traditionally contributed very different forms of knowledge, methodology, and results. However, many such collaborations often turn out as science communication and dissemination activities that make no concrete contribution to technological innovation. Magic Lining, a transdisciplinary collaborative project involving artistic and scientific partners working in the fields of e-textile design, cognitive neuroscience and human-computer interaction, creates a shared experiential knowledge space. This article focuses on the research question of how a transdisciplinary collaborative design processinvolving material explorations, prototyping, first-person-perspective and user studies, can lead to the creation of a garment that invites various perceptual and emotional responses in its wearer. The article reflects on the design journey, highlighting the transdisciplinary team's research through design experience and shared language for knowledge exchange. This process has revealed new research paths for an emerging field of 'sensorial clothing', combining the various team members' fields of expertise and resulting in a wearable prototype.

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Technologies change rapidly our perception of reality, moving from augmented to virtual to magical. While e-textiles are a key component in exergame or space suits, the transformative potential of the internal side of garments to create embodied experiences still remains largely unexplored. This paper is the result from an art-science collaborative project that combines recent neuroscience findings, body-centered design principles and 2D vibrotactile array-based fabrics to alter one's body perception. We describe an iterative design process intertwined with two user studies on the effects on bodyperceptions and emotional responses of various vibration patterns within textile that were designed as spatial haptic metaphors. Our results show potential in considering materials (e.g., rocks) as sensations to design for body perceptions (e.g., being heavy, strong) and emotional responses. We discuss these results in terms of sensory effects on body perception and synergetic impact to research on embodiment in virtual environments, human-computer interaction, and e-textile design. The work brings a new perspective to the sensorial design of embodied experiences which is based on "material perception" and haptic metaphors, and highlights potential opportunities opened by haptic clothing to change body-perception.

This pictorial illustrates the methodological tools for articulating the felt experience of chronic pain used for designing somaesthetic interactions. To do this, it presents the design process of a case study named Squeaky/Pain, a soma extension aiming to augment somaesthetic awareness of the pain involved in the appreciation of both pleasant and disturbing feelings and sensations. The soma extension is an interactive wearable that facilitates a sound-motion interaction to mimic the wearer’s pain experience, from agony to relief. The case study focuses on a less explored aspect of somaesthetic interactions which is the mediation of disturbing experiences for sensory awareness. Through the soma extension that mediates disturbing experiences, the study aims to improve people’s somatic knowledge and their lives as a result. The design process of Squeaky/Pain requires detailed accounts of lived bodily experiences to create somaesthetic interactions. To access a detailed articulation of felt experiences, various tools are employed to articulate the first- and second-person pain experience for design use. These are different types of body maps, video analysis, material and form explorations, journals, in-depth interviews and self-interviews. The ideation and the testing phases have proven that such tools complement one another to access the versatile aspects of felt experiences. In this pictorial, we demonstrate ways in which visual, verbal and written tools can be applied to reveal implicit bodily experiences to inform somaesthetic interaction design.

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