Giving Body to Digital Fashion Tools

‘Super technology is going to ask for super tactility’ (Lidewii Edelkoort). Exploring this statement, this chapter reflects on the disconnection between digital fashion tools that lack sensory feedback and the critical role of designers’ embodied experience for their practice. In order to support this discussion, additional literature is brought in, which shows that in dance bodily engagement is crucial for supporting and enhancing the creative process. This is done to explore aspects of mediation and embodiment further, and to propose a research agenda for the investigation of textile experience

How do designers feel textiles?

Studying tactile experience is important and timely, considering how this channel is being harnessed both in terms of human interaction and for technological developments that rely on it to enhance experience of products and services. Research into tactile experience to date is present mostly within the social context, but there are not many studies on the understanding of tactile experience in interaction with objects. In this paper, we use textiles as a case study to investigate how we can get people to talk about this experience, and to understand what may be important to consider when designing technology to support it. We present a qualitative exploratory study using the ‘Elicitation Interview’ method to obtain a first-person verbal description of experiential processes. We conducted an initial study with 6 experienced professionals from the fashion and textiles area. The analysis revealed that there are two types of touch behaviour in experiencing textiles, active and passive, which happen through ‘Active hand’, ‘Passive body’ and ‘Active tool-hand’. They can occur in any order, and with different degrees of importance and frequency in the 3 tactile-based phases of the textile selection process — ‘Situate’, ‘Simulate’ and ‘Stimulate’ — and the interaction has different modes in each. We discuss these themes to inform the design of technology for affective touch in the textile field, but also to explore a methodology to uncover the complexity of affective touch and its various purposes

The Compositor Tool: Investigating Consumer Experiences in the Circular Economy

Humanity is living through a crisis that sees our way of life exhausting the resources of the earth and ourselves. The fashion sector shows the negative impacts of conspicuous consumption on our socioenvironmental wellbeing. Despite citizens’ growing awareness of their responsibility within consumption cycles, they reveal concerns about their lack of understanding and the support required for them to become agents of responsible consumption. The Circular Economy flourishes as a conceptual approach to help society transition to a more sustainable existence. This paper explores how emerging creative technology and interaction design might support a shift in the role of citizens in the Circular Economy. We performed a design inquiry that investigated the moment of acquisition via configuration of products, storytelling, and multimodal interaction techniques for the creation of experiences that could catalyse citizen-consumers to become custodians of materials. We developed a retail-based concept tool—The Compositor Tool—with which we ran a user study to investigate new experiential ways that consumers can participate in materials’ circularity. The study highlighted how experience design and new interaction techniques can introduce circularity as part of consumer experience by forging deeper connections between people and products/materials and enabling consumers to have more creative and informative material engagement

FabTouch: A Tool to Enable Communication and Design of Tactile and Affective Fabric Experiences

The tactile experience of fabric is not only a sensory experience but also an affective one. Our choice of fabric products, like clothing, is often based on how they feel. Effectively communicating such experiences is crucial for designing tactile fabric experiences. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding of the fabric tactile and affective experiences, preventing the development of tools to facilitate the communication of these experiences. In this paper, we examine the fabric experiences of 27 participants towards nine cotton samples. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to create FabTouch, a novel tool to facilitate a dialogue in the design of fabric experiences. We found six phases of fabric touch experiences including fabric touch responses, sensory associations, and emotional responses. Initial feedback from designers suggested that FabTouch could enrich design processes both in practice and in education and can create inspiration for physical and digital design explorations

T²GR²: Textile Touch Gesture Recognition with Graph Representation of EMG

The fashion industry’s negative impact and overconsumption require urgent action to improve and reduce fashion consumption. Tactile gesture plays a vital role in understanding, selecting, and feeling attached to clothes. In this paper, we introduce the FabricTouch II dataset with multimodal infromation, which focuses on fabric assessment touch gestures and aims to support sustainable fashion consumption. By integrating gesture labels, we enhance the dataset’s comprehensiveness, improve recognition accuracy, and provide valuable information for consumers and intelligent systems, such as conversational agents in shop or home wardrobe. Additionally, this study has made preliminary explorations on recognizing fabric touch gestures using time-spectral representations of EMG combined with graph representations on this small batch dataset. The experiment found that the graph representation of EMG outperforms the regular neural network and that the representation capacity of bilateral EMG data is superior to that of unilateral data

Modalities of expression: Capturing embodied knowledge in cooking

When cooking we negotiate between instructions in recipes and personal preferences to make in-the-moment creative decisions. This process represents moments of creativity that utilise and reveal our embodied knowledge. This paper focuses on the capture of expressions of embodied knowledge by digitally-networked utensils. We present a design process investigating the design of tangible interfaces to capture and communicate embodied knowledge as a proposition for recipe authoring tools for open innovation in food. We reflect upon this process to discuss lessons about the individual nature of embodied knowledge and its expression, and the context of capturing it to make design recommendations

Investigating nuanced sensory experiences in textiles selection

In this study, research tools are used to investigate designers' textile selection activities and uncover the sensorial experiences that underpin those activities. Such tools were purposely introduced to disrupt the way designers generally interact with textiles and generate conversations around it. The study was conducted in a textile fair during two consecutive years with an expert audience who were in the mind-set of sourcing. This study resulted in four main themes that reveal the importance of the multisensory experience to textile selection, and the complexity of remembering and communicating such experiences in the design process, given how tacit such experiences are

Anonymised interview transcripts

Anonymised interview transcripts for project: Consumer Experience Digital Tools for Dematerialisation for the Circular Econom

The future of textiles sourcing: exploring the potential for digital tools

Textile selection involves aspects of objective function and subjective experience. While technical assessments of textiles are extensively supported by standards and machinery that provide the industry with rigorous specifications, the more subjective characteristics remain heavily reliant on designers’ tacit knowledge, experience and intuition. In this paper, we present a study that investigated designers’ textile sourcing activities and if and how digital tools could provide support. The study was conducted in a textile fair with an expert audience in the mind-set of sourcing. An existing digital tool that allows textiles manipulation was introduced to familiarise participants with the digital context and enable conversations on the future of textiles sourcing. We also look at the implications of adopting digital tools for their activities including a transition to more sustainable practices. The results raise awareness of designers’ use of experiential information to support textiles sourcing, besides highlighting requirements for designing future digital tools

Examining clothing repair practices, core competences, techniques, tools and community structures involved in extending the life of garments

The rise of fast fashion as a feature of post-industrial societies has distanced people from many of the habitual practices associated with caring for and valuing clothes. This includes both acquiring and applying the skills to make and mend clothes and understanding fibres and fabrics to develop deeper connections to materials. The principles advocated by a circular economy (CE) require societies to recover these once held values and restore our relationship with materials and practices to keep clothing in use for as long as possible and to reduce consumption. Such CE practices will require our societies to align with current socio-technical developments, where people are increasingly adopting technologies (through e.g. applications, tutorials), to support making and mending practices, and to play and express themselves creatively whilst keeping apparel in use. The study aims to examine self-repair practices and repair services from practitioners’ viewpoints, evaluating available support, and identifying challenges and opportunities to integrate repair practices more widely in society. The results suggest it is critical to develop the skills to mend and customize the garments people own and provide additional support for people to become custodians of clothes. This study is part of a larger project to identify opportunities where technology could intervene in a repair process and facilitate opportunities for people to reconnect with materials and acquire repair skills. To develop this idea, we designed an interview study to investigate practices of clothing repair to determine if and where such support might be welcomed. Researchers conducted interviews with three groups of people – brands, repair practitioners and community initiatives to gather insights into repair practices, core competences, techniques, tools and community structures involved in extending the life of garments. Insights from the findings address some of the underexplored areas of a clothes repair practice across the three settings. We identify the important relationship of material knowledge to repair and the limited attention given to different types of repair tools and their application. As material skills and knowledge diminish across society it can undermine the drive to scale-up the practice of repair. Knowledge from the findings will inform further research to map the repair process and break it down into stages to identify opportunities where digital tools could intervene to help facilitate aspects of the process for people across different settings