The creation of e-textile swatches is a common practice for documenting material experiments, sharing techniques with other practitioners, and for concept ideation. The Creative Interactions Lab has developed a system that turns e-textile swatches into easily connectable “bits”, Wearable Bits, so that swatches can move between being an ideation tool into a prototyping tool(kit). The benefit of this approach is that experimental swatches and ideas for their use can be easily tested in context.
Wearable Bits enables designers and researchers to co-design with end-users, who can freely express their wearable e-textile concepts and work on the fly.