Facilitating a ‘non-judgmental’ skills-based co-design environment

This paper reflects on a pilot study for the design of a series of e-textiles workshops developed for the Nottinghamshire Mind Network community of mental health and wellbeing service users, managers and volunteers. The final workshops will form part of ‘An Internet of Soft Things’ (IoSofT) project, which seeks to develop a Person-Centred Approach (PCA) to design. The workshops should be experienced by participants as a non-judgemental environment, as one of the conditions of the Person-Centred Approach – unconditional positive regard (UPR) (Rogers, 1957). While the research team agree in theory that participants should feel safe and supported, putting non-judgement into practice in a multi - disciplinary environment, in which skills form the basis of workshop activity, has proved to be challenging. The paper introduces the key criteria of the PCA in psychotherapy, and describes the particular challenges that being non-judgemental presented to the textile designers and therapeutic practitioners who designed and facilitated the workshops. It presents an analysis of the design artefacts produced in the course of six workshop sessions (such as the ‘group agreement’), and participant feedback, and discusses the resulting framework that will be applied in the next iteration of workshops to enable participants’ comfort, creativity and autonomy

Reflections on the heuristic experiences of a multidisciplinary team trying to bring the PCA to participatory design (with emphasis on the IPR method)

This paper introduces a heuristic case study, reflecting on the use of the Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) method as part of An Internet of Soft Things, a multidisciplinary design research project working with the UK mental health charity, Mind. The three authors represent three different disciplines within the project – Psychotherapy, e-Textiles, and Human-Computer Interaction – and naturally bring their own experiences and expectations to the multidisciplinary team process. The aim of the project is to develop, through practice, a methodology for a Person-Centred Approach to design, informed by the theories and practice of Carl Rogers, and thereby to address the increasing need for researcher reflection in Participatory Design. The paper outlines the project and describes our experiences of IPR within it; it discusses how we are taking this work forward and closes with some guidelines based on our personal observations in working with this method

Weaving Lighthouses and Stitching Stories: Blind and Visually Impaired People Designing E-textiles

We describe our experience of working with blind and visually impaired people to create interactive art objects that are personal to them, through a participatory making process using electronic textiles (e-textiles) and hands-on crafting techniques. The research addresses both the practical considerations about how to structure hands-on making workshops in a way which is accessible to participants of varying experience and abilities, and how effective the approach was in enabling participants to tell their own stories and feel in control of the design and making process. The results of our analysis is the offering of insights in how to run e-textile making sessions in such a way for them to be more accessible and inclusive to a wider community of participants

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Embodied textiles for expression and wellbeing

To date, experiences with technical textiles have largely been focused on performance related aspects of a fabric developed for specific applications such as sports, health or safety (Shishoo 2005), and methodological problems remain with the techniques employed to measure what is a complex of effect and affect (Bartels 2005, Jordan 2000). However, there has been little in the way of empirical research into personal human experience with technical fabrics in context, with the notable exception perhaps of Entwistle who examines in depth the kinesthetic properties of particular garments, resulting in heightened awareness of the body (Entwistle & Wilson 2001) and Candy, who analyses feelings of well being and the performance of socially meaningful demeanours (Candy 2007a, Candy 2007b). We wish to extend this embodied view of textiles in order to realise the potential of smart and technical fabrics and sensory environments as tools for wellbeing, mental health and personal expression. This paper describes the work of an interdisciplinary group of practitioners and researchers investigating the development and application of textile stretch sensors on the body (Breedon et al 2008), figures 1 and 2. Understanding that such tactile products and materials may offer beneficial contexts for in-the-moment and expressive therapeutic techniques (Jones 2010, Jones & Wallis 2005), we describe the early stages of our collaborative development of an evaluation framework based on person-centred principles and outline the future work planned

My boy builds coffins. Future memories of your loved ones

The research is focus on the concept of storytelling associated with product design, trying to investigate new ways of designing and a possible future scenario related to the concept of death. MY BOY BUILDS COFFINS is a gravestone made using a combination of cremation’s ashes and resin. It is composed by a series of holes in which the user can stitch a text, in order to remember the loved one. The stitching need of a particular yarn produced in Switzerland using some parts of human body. Project also provides another version which uses LED lights instead of the yarn. The LEDs - thanks to an inductive coupling - will light when It will be posed in the hole. The gravestone can be placed where you want, as if it would create a little altar staff at home. In this way, there is a real connection between the user and the dearly departed