The design process of a multi-disciplinary tool for developing interactive textiles

Abstract

Interactive textiles embed sensing and actuating capabilities in their fibers and structure. Adoption of interactive textiles is complex requiring a combination of competences or collaboration between interaction designers, textile designers and textile engineers.

Learning with Stitch Samplers: Exploring Stitch Samplers as Contextual Instructions for E-textile Tutorials

“…Within e-textile research the focus has been on the second, sampler swatches, with e-textile examples used as demonstrations for cross-disciplinary collaboration and ideation [15,26,92,101], for sharing techniques and materials among experienced practitioners [34,77,98], or for experiments and documentation of design process [28]. Previous work has used swatches and samplers to ideate a wide variety of textiles including touch-sensing textiles [74], colour-changing textiles [16], shape changing textiles [29,68,97], knitted controllers [61], non-wearable textiles [65], and textile physical afordances [64].…”

“…Research question: Though previous work on samplers and swatches has focused on demonstration samplers to communicate, share, disseminate and record techniques [16,26,34,64,97,98], this paper focuses instead on practice samplers and how novices can learn and practice techniques through samplers. Our overarching research question is the following: 'How should we design practice samplers to help individuals practice the tacit skill of stitching while learning how to make e-textile paterns?…”

Empowering Textile and Fashion Designers with E-Textiles for Creative Expression

“…They present a new form of expressive materials for fashion and textile designers in their design process [4], enabling textiles and fashion items to be digitally functionalized while also remaining stylish [5]. However, expertise in e-textiles is inherently interdisciplinary as it requires the mastery of both material and of interactive technology systems, or collaboration between technologists, textile designers, and textile engineers [6].…”

E-textile Learning Scaffolds: Supports for Novices Learning E-textile Concepts and Techniques

“…Within e-textile research the focus has been on the second, sampler swatches, with e-textile examples used as demonstrations for cross-disciplinary collaboration and ideation [50,83,255,305], for sharing techniques and materials among experienced practitioners [106,231,293], or for experiments and documentation of design process [87]. Previous work has used swatches and samplers to ideate a wide variety of textiles including touch-sensing textiles [221], colour-changing textiles [52], shape changing textiles [203,88,291], knitted controllers [180], non-wearable textiles [196],…”

“…Research question: Though previous work on samplers and swatches has focused on demonstration samplers to communicate, share, disseminate and record techniques [52,83,106,195,291,293], this chapter focuses instead on practice samplers and how novices can learn and practice techniques through samplers. Our overarching research question is the following: 'How should we design practice samplers to help individuals practice the tacit skill of stitching while learning how to make e-textile patterns?…”