Woven smart textiles are useful in creating flexible electronics because they integrate circuitry into the structure of the fabric itself. However, there do not yet exist tools that support the specific needs of smart textiles weavers. This paper describes the process and development of AdaCAD, an application for composing smart textile weave drafts. By augmenting traditional weaving drafts, AdaCAD allows weavers to design woven structures and circuitry in tandem and offers specific support for common smart textiles techniques. We describe these techniques, how our tool supports them alongside feedback from smart textiles weavers. We conclude with a reflection on smart textiles practice more broadly and suggest that the metaphor of coproduction can be fruitful in creating effective tools and envisioning future applications in this space.
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Unfabricate: Designing Smart Textiles for Disassembly
Smart textiles development is combining computing and textile technologies to create tactile, functional objects such as smart garments, soft medical devices, and space suits. However, the field also combines the massive waste streams of both the digital electronics and textiles industries. The following work explores how HCI researchers might be poised to address sustainability and waste in future smart textiles development through interventions at design time. Specifically, we perform a design inquiry into techniques and practices for reclaiming and reusing smart textiles materials and explore how such techniques can be integrated into smart textiles design tools. Beginning with a practice in sustainable or "slow" fashion, unravelling a garment into yarn, the suite of explorations titled "Unfabricate" probes values of time and labor in crafting a garment; speculates how a smart textile garment may be designed with reuse in mind; and imagines how electronic and textile components may be given new life in novel uses.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10162022
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376227
