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.

This shows swatch-bits wooden together as clothes and a chair.

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.

People

Publications

conference

Wearable Bits: Scaffolding Creativity with a Prototyping Toolkit for Wearable E-textiles

Lee Jones, Sara Nabil, Amanda McLeod, Audrey Girouard

ACM Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interactions TEI 2020, 2020

workshop

Swatch-bits: Prototyping E-textiles with Modular Swatches

Lee Jones, Sara Nabil, Audrey Girouard

ACM Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interactions TEI 2020, 2020

conference

A Co-Design Toolkit for Wearable E-textiles

Lee Jones

Ubicomp / ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC'19)., 2019