Oscar Tomico

Embodied Design Ideation Methods: Analysing the Power of Estrangement

Embodied design ideation practices work with relationships between body, material and context to enliven design and research potential. Methods are often idiosyncratic and due to their physical nature not easily transferred. This presents challenges for designers wishing to develop and share techniques or contribute to research. We present a framework that enables designers to understand, describe and contextualise their embodied design ideation practices in ways that can be understood by peers, as well as those new to embodied ideation. Our framework developed over two conference workshops provides a frame for discussion of embodied design actions that leverage the power of estrangement. We apply our framework to eight embodied design ideation methods. Our contribution is thus twofold: (1) a framework to understand and leverage the power of estrangement in embodied design ideation, and (2) an inspirational catalogue demonstrating the diversity of ideas that embodied design ideation methods can foster.

Co-reflection: user involvement for highly dynamic design processes

User involvement in systems, products and related services design has increased considerably in relevance. The way user involvement actually progresses depends on how the users are situated in relation to the design process. Their influence may extend from the results of the design project to planning and managing the course of the design project. Sequential techniques developed for the rational problem solving or reflective process have a limited application in highly dynamic design processes. More precisely, in sequential design processes validation steers reflection into a single direction. For this reason, a methodological approach not based on the sequential (hypothetical-deductive) paradigm but on the dialectical inquiry (inductive paradigm) between designers and users is considered. The versatile and holistic nature of this co-reflective process makes it suitable for dynamic and unstructured design processes based on different streams of reflection.

Soft, embodied, situated & connected: enriching interactions with soft wearables

BackgroundSoft wearables include clothing and textile-based accessories that incorporate smart textiles and soft electronic interfaces to enable responsive and interactive experiences. When designed well, soft wearables leverage the cultural, sociological and material qualities of textiles, fashion and dress; diverse capabilities and meanings of the body; as well as the qualities and capabilities afforded by smart and programmable elements. Textiles behave in particular ways. They are part of culture. No matter a person’s views on fashion, dress, their own or others’ body, they will have an intimate relationship with textiles, as they are one of the few products worn much of the time, often in direct contact with the body. When designing wearables a designer must consider a range of requirements that do not typically demand focus when designing products that are not worn, including: sensitivity to material detail; an eye for fit and comfort on bodies with diverse shapes and movement capabilities; openness to a diversity of meanings that may be generated; as well as consideration of wearers’ intimate relations with technology. Soft wearables allow for greater scope within these requirements.ResultsIn this article, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of designing soft wearables, applying notions of situatedness and personal meaning-making to understand and posit values in relation to outcomes. We present three design cases with different uses of the body, material, and context; and reflect on how these different uses impact the design process (challenges and oportunities).ConclusionWe provide three broad recommendations on how to ideate, explore and prototype to aid wearables research and development to arrive at rich interactions that are soft, embodied, situated and connected.

Mobile Collocated Interactions With Wearables

Research on mobile collocated interactions has been looking at situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices, thus going from personal/individual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. However, computers are getting smaller, more powerful, and closer to our bodies. Therefore, mobile collocated interactions research, which originally looked at smartphones and tablets, will inevitably move towards fully integrated wearable technologies. The focus of this workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, designers and practitioners to explore the potential of extending mobile collocated interactions from, through and around the body using wearable technologies.

Tactile Dialogues: Personalization of Vibrotactile Behavior to Trigger Interpersonal Communication

This article describes tests that have been conducted with Tactile Dialogues, a textile pillow that can react to touch with vibrotactile stimuli and haptic sensations. Tactile Dialogues is designed to stimulate movement and interpersonal contact for patients in the late stages of dementia, their family members and their caregivers. The most recent prototype of the pillow has been tested during 15 separate visits of family members or caregivers with patients. The aim of these tests is to find out whether personalization of the vibrotactile stimuli is appreciated over a mirroring vibrotactile behavior. We propose a three-scale measurement to help family members and caregivers examine the responses of the patient: muscular relaxation, physical movement and interpersonal contact. Through the semi-structured interviews we identified that family members and caregivers do appreciate the opportunity to personalize the vibrotactile behavior and that the pillow mainly functions as a way to establish communication with the patient.

Crafting wearables: interaction design meets fashion design

As people intimate relation with all kinds of technologies evolves, new expressive and interactive technologies are becoming relevant for the field of design. Loom is a garment that fits tight around the upper body, supporting the posture and preventing large movements. Small movements therefore become the focus of the interaction. Through the use of NiTi wires the collar moves upward; by hand the collar can be pushed down. The continuous moving up and pushing down creates a subtle touch on the neck, supporting relaxation and meditation activities. Loom is part of a set of wearables [1] that explored the boundaries between the human body, its movement and the technological possibilities. The goal was to blend Phenomenology [2], interaction design, and fashion design in order to create new design practices.

Research through design : A way to drive innovative solutions in the field of smart textiles

Research through design allows creating a dialogue with the material. It uses making and reflection on action as a generator of knowledge. Our aim is to explore the opportunities and challenges of smart textiles. The Fablab is our set up, a place that allows us to combine the hacking- scientific-, and design community. It stimulates collaboration and the knowledge exchange needed for the development of smart textile systems. A collaborative prototyping workshop for medical products combined two worlds. The textile world in Saxion aims at incorporating conductive materials into textile structures and functional- / 3D printing to create systems for applications such as flexible heating systems and wearable technology. We combined this with the world of Industrial Design at TU/e, focused on the design of intelligent products, systems and services by the research through design approach. The collaboration between these different disciplines speeded up the process by reducing the resistance to the new and skipped the frustration on failure.

Growth plan for an inspirational test-bed of smart textile services

In this pictorial we visualize the growth plan for an inspirational test-bed of smart textile product service systems. The goal of the test-bed is to inspire and inform the Dutch creative industries of textile, interaction and service design to combine their strengths and share opportunities. The pictures exemplify the characteristic tools, approaches and prototypes for three phases of growth: Incubation, Nursery and Adoption.

Embodying Soft Wearables Research

The value of engaging sensory motor skills in the design and use of smart systems is increasingly recognized. Yet robust and reliable methods for development, reporting and transfer are not fully understood. This workshop investigates the role of embodied design research techniques in the context of soft wearables. Throughout, we will experiment with how embodied design research techniques might be shared, developed, and used as direct and unmediated vehicles for their own reporting. Rather than engage in oral presentations, participants will lead each other through a proven embodied method or approach. Then small groups will create mash-ups of techniques, exploring ways that the new approaches might be coherently reported. By applying such methods to the problem of their reporting, we hope to deepen understanding of how to move towards nuanced and repeatable methods for embodied design and knowledge transfer in the context of soft wearables.

7 – Designing ultra-personalised embodied smart textile services for well-being

Smart textiles are becoming more integrated with service ecosystems that go beyond the current horizontal textile value chain. This will extend the material and tangible properties of smart textiles to intangible properties from services, such as the ability to measure and store data and change the functionality of a material over time. It is thus becoming more urgent for textile developers and service providers to work closer together to develop these types of smart textile services (STSs). This opens up a vast field of opportunities for textile developers, product designers, and service designers to combine their disciplines to develop close-to-the-body applications in the area of well-being. The role of the body, the degree of personalisation, and the prototyping process provide opportunities for ultra-personalisation within these new types of embodied STSs. We present an overview of commercially available STSs based on these three elements. We then analyse three STSs that we have developed in the context of well-being. We advocate that within the exemplified STSs the service interface is strongly connected to the bodily senses of the people using the service. This connection is further specified with three notions of ultra-personalisation: personalisation through the material properties, the design of the garment, and the programming of the interactions with the wearer.