Extending the life of our clothes is the most effective intervention of all current sustainable textile practices. We explored how we can upcycle and repair our clothes with e-textiles, and how to share these techniques with other makers and crafters. In one study, we proposed Punch-Sketching e-textiles, a drawing technique that uses a punch needle to iteratively prototype soft circuits (the left figure).

We also took a craft ethnography approach by interviewing 15 visible mending educators for insights into how they teach the techniques of repair and re-use so individuals can upcycle the textiles they already own (the right figure). Overall, these interviews provide insights for textile maker toolkits, textile personal fabrication, and how we can teach tangible hybrid crafts and sustainable making practices.

This shows the Punch-Sketching e-textiles technique, which enables individuals to “draw" with a single conductive thread

We developed several novel ideation scaffolding method for eliciting wearable concepts, called Wearable Crazy Eights, and a co-design toolkit for wearable e-textiles called Wearable Bits.

By developing these novel methods for the study of e-textiles, our goal is to involve individuals with and without disabilities in the design of their own garments so that we can build prototypes that better suit their needs.

This shows the process of Wearable Crazy Eight.

People

Lee Jones

Audrey Girouard

Sara Nabil

Miriam Sturdee

Publications

conference

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

Lee Jones, Audrey Girouard

ACM SIGCHI Conference Designing Interactive Systems 2022 (DIS'22), 2022

[PDF]
poster

The E-darning Sampler: Exploring E-textile Repair with Darning Looms

Lee Jones

Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’21), February 14–17, 2021, Salzburg, Austria., 2021

[PDF] [YouTube] ACM DL Authorize service
poster

Wearable Crazy Eights: Wearable Ideation Methods for Encouraging Divergent Design Concepts

Lee Jones, Sara Nabil, Audrey Girouard

Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’21), February 14–17, 2021, Salzburg, Austria, 2021

[PDF] ACM DL Authorize service
conference

Punch-Sketching E-textiles: Exploring Punch Needle as a Technique for Sustainable, Accessible, and Iterative Physical Prototyping with E-textiles

Lee Jones, Miriam Sturdee, Sara Nabil, Audrey Girouard

Fifthteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’21), February 14–17, 2021, Salzburg, Austria., 2021

[PDF] [YouTube] ACM DL Authorize service
conference

Patching Textiles: Insights from Visible Mending Educators on Wearability, Extending the Life of Our Clothes, and Teaching Tangible Crafts

Lee Jones, Audrey Girouard

Creativity and Cognition (C&C'21), 2021

[PDF]