Designing towards inward-oriented fashion technology: Demo projects

Fashion technology designs typically combine sensing technology and actuators to register and respond to information about the environment and/or the human body. The ways in which designers use and integrate these data into garments, however, varies on a scale from highly theatrical and outward-oriented designs to subtle and inward-oriented applications. This pictorial presents five garment designs created between 2013 and 2020, that occupy the more utilitarian and inward-oriented end of the fashion technology spectrum. We demonstrate five designs that combine sensing and actuation, highlighting the benefits of direct biofeedback and of keeping the personal data within the garment. The selection of projects aims to search the right balance between sensing and actuation

Embodied Design Ideation Methods: Analysing the Power of Estrangement

Embodied design ideation practices work with relationships between body, material and context to enliven design and research potential. Methods are often idiosyncratic and - due to their physical nature - not easily transferred. This presents challenges for designers wishing to develop and share techniques or contribute to research. We present a framework that enables designers to understand, describe and contextualise their embodied design ideation practices in ways that can be understood by peers, as well as those new to embodied ideation. Our framework - developed over two conference workshops - provides a frame for discussion of embodied design actions that leverage the power of estrangement. We apply our framework to eight embodied design ideation methods. Our contribution is thus twofold: (1) a framework to understand and leverage the power of estrangement in embodied design ideation, and (2) an inspirational catalogue demonstrating the diversity of ideas that embodied design ideation methods can foster. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM

Tailoring Digital Touch: An ethnography of designers' touch practices during garment prototyping and the potential for their digitisation

At a time of rapid digital transition in garment design industries and education, this thesis ethnographically documents garment designers’ use of touch and its role in meaning-making and understanding during garment prototyping. A novel diffractive ethnographic attention is utilised to attune to differing aspects of touch and felt experience, revealing the significance of the felt, kinaesthetic awareness of the moving body to garment prototyping. Further demonstrating that designers relate felt histories of material entanglement with their moving bodies to their contemporary experience. Development of felt histories is thus identified as a key means of designers’ enskillment, alongside moments of overlooked and informal skills sharing. A socio-material perspective informed by New Materialism is adopted to foreground the critical role of designers’ entanglement with non-human things in structuring their felt experience and deriving meaning from it. Significantly, this thesis demonstrates that sensations are perceived beyond the conventionally defined body in and through entangled tools and materials and that sensations are socio-materially mutable and can be altered by peers directing designers to touch and feel in particular ways. This problematises current haptic technologies, which simulate touch at physical and virtual boundaries. The ethnographic data is supplemented by two workshop studies facilitating garment designers to engage with prototypical digital touch technologies, enabling speculation on future digital touch tools more relevant to garment prototyping. The thesis analytically discusses differing theoretical stances on non-human agency in design and making and their implications for digital touch tools. It concludes by proposing a theoretical Framework of Garment Designers’ Felt Enskillment and making recommendations for the design of digital touch interfaces for garment prototyping. The findings of the thesis contribute to the fields of HCI, design and education, deepening academic understandings of designers’ sensory experience and the impact of digital processes, potentially informing future technology development

Embodying Soft Wearables Research

The value of engaging sensory motor skills in the design and use of smart systems is increasingly recognized. Yet robust and reliable methods for development, reporting and transfer are not fully understood. This workshop investigates the role of embodied design research techniques in the context of soft wearables. Throughout, we will experiment with how embodied design research techniques might be shared, developed, and used as direct and unmediated vehicles for their own reporting. Rather than engage in oral presentations, participants will lead each other through a proven embodied method or approach. Then small groups will create mash-ups of techniques, exploring ways that the new approaches might be coherently reported. By applying such methods to the problem of their reporting, we hope to deepen understanding of how to move towards nuanced and repeatable methods for embodied design and knowledge transfer in the context of soft wearables

Embodying soft wearables research

The value of engaging sensory motor skills in the design and use of smart systems is increasingly recognized. Yet robust and reliable methods for development, reporting and transfer are not fully understood. This workshop investigates the role of embodied design research techniques in the context of soft wearables. Throughout, we will experiment with how embodied design research techniques might be shared, developed, and used as direct and unmediated vehicles for their own reporting. Rather than engage in oral presentations, participants will lead each other through a proven embodied method or approach. Then small groups will create mash-ups of techniques, exploring ways that the new approaches might be coherently reported. By applying such methods to the problem of their reporting, we hope to deepen understanding of how to move towards nuanced and repeatable methods for embodied design and knowledge transfer in the context of soft wearables