Sharon Baurley

Interactive and experiential design in smart textile products and applications

The technical textiles industry in the USA and the EU is growing. As we advance into the knowledge age, objects and material technology will disappear into our material environment, turning unintelligent objects into active and intelligent participants in our lives. As much of our environment is made up from textile materials, they will be the targets of smart engineering. The future of smart textiles will rely on the convergence of electrochemistry and textiles in order to process electronic polymers into fibres and fabrics. The integration of smart functionality into clothing and other textile products will radically change the culture surrounding these products, fundamentally altering people’s relationships with them and the way they use them. Smart functionality will also have an impact on the way products are designed and the materials developed.

The brain's response to pleasant touch: an EEG investigation of tactile caressing.

Somatosensation as a proximal sense can have a strong impact on our attitude toward physical objects and other human beings. However, relatively little is known about how hedonic valence of touch is processed at the cortical level. Here we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of affective tactile sensation during caressing of the right forearm with pleasant and unpleasant textile fabrics. We show dissociation between more physically driven differential brain responses to the different fabrics in early somatosensory cortex – the well-known mu-suppression (10–20 Hz) – and a beta-band response (25–30 Hz) in presumably higher-order somatosensory areas in the right hemisphere that correlated well with the subjective valence of tactile caressing. Importantly, when using single trial classification techniques, beta-power significantly distinguished between pleasant and unpleasant stimulation on a single trial basis with high accuracy. Our results therefore suggest a dissociation of the sensory and affective aspects of touch in the somatosensory system and may provide features that may be used for single trial decoding of affective mental states from simple electroencephalographic measurements.

Testing a grassroots citizen science venture using open design, "the bee lab project"

The Bee Lab project applies Citizen Science and Open Design to beekeeping, enabling participants to construct monitoring devices gathering reciprocal data, motivating participants and third parties. The presented approach uses design workshops to provide insight into the design of kits, user motivations, promoting reciprocal interests and address community problems. This paper signposts issues and opportunities in the process of designing Citizen Science tools for communities using Open Design to solve individual problems, including: downloadable design for social/local change, laypeople creating technology and repairable kits.

Making instructions for others: exploring mental models through a simple exercise

Models help bridge the gap between observing and making---especially when systems are involved (as in designing for interaction, service, and evolution). This forum introduces new models, links them to existing models, and describes their histories and why they matter. Hugh Dubberly, Editor

The affective experience of handling digital fabrics: tactile and visual cross-modal effects

In the textile sector, emotions are often associated with both physical touch and manipulation of the product. Thus there is the need to recreate the affective experiences of touching and interacting with fabrics using commonly available internet technology. New digital interactive representations of fabrics simulating handling have been proposed with the idea of bringing the digital experience of fabrics closer to the reality. This study evaluates the contribution of handling real fabrics to viewing digital interactive animations of said fabrics and vice versa. A combination of self-report and physiological measures was used. Results showed that having previous physical handling experience of the fabrics significantly increased pleasure and engagement in the visual experience of the digital handling of the same fabrics. Two factors mediated these experiences: gender and interoceptive awareness. Significant results were not found for the opposite condition.

An Embodiment Perspective of Affective Touch Behaviour in Experiencing Digital Textiles

Handling textiles is not only a semantic experience, but also an emotional one. Whilst handling a textile is crucial for its appreciation and understanding, this channel is still little explored in the digital realm, where focus has been given to the haptic feedback aspect of handling. In this paper, we discuss the importance of touch behaviour in interactive digital handling to allow people to explore, emotionally engage with and understand textile properties. We build on our findings from previous studies, where we investigated how people handle fabrics in real-life situations and more generally how their touch behaviour may affect the experience, relating it to literature from textile, HCI, embodied cognition and embodied affect to discuss how current technology should develop to provide a more realistic touch experience. Additionally, we consider how crowd sourcing of the textile experience could be extended by taking into account non-verbal expressions of textile-handling experience. We show that further knowledge is needed to design interactive technology that supports active and unconstrained touch, as well as the affective aspects of experience.

Methods for studying technology in the home

Technology is becoming ever more integral to our home lives, and visions such as ubiquitous computing, smart technologies and the Internet of Things represent a further stage of this development. However studying interactions and experiences in the home, and drawing understanding from this to inform design, is a substantial challenge. A significant strand of research on technology in home life has developed in the CHI community and beyond, with a range of methods being created, adapted and used in combination. This workshop brings together a diverse group of researchers to develop a coherent understanding of this methodological space, and to identify connections and gaps, where further development of methods can occur to overcome issues specific to studying the home.

A Consumer-Centric Open Innovation Framework for Food and Packaging Manufacturing

Closed innovation approaches have been employed for many years in the food industry. But, this sector recently perceives its end-user to be wary of radically new products and changes in consumption patterns. However, new product development involves not only the product itself but also the entire manufacturing and distribution network. In this paper, we present a new ICT based framework that embraces open innovation to place customers in the product development loop but at the same time assesses and eventually coordinates the entire manufacturing and supply chain. The aim is to design new food products that consumers will buy and at the same time ensure that these products will reach the consumer in time and at adequate quantity. On the product development side, our framework enables new food products that offer an integrated sensory experience of food and packaging, which encompass customization, healthy eating, and sustainability.

Open Design: Contributions, Solutions, Processes and Projects

ABSTRACT Open design is a catchall term for various on- and offline design and making activities. It can be used to describe a type of design process that allows for (is open to) the participation of anybody (novice or professional) in the collaborative development of something. As well as this, it can mean the distribution and unrestricted use of design blueprints and documentation for the use by others. In this paper, the authors highlight various aspects of open and collaborative design and argue for the use of new terms that address what is open and when. A range of design projects and online platforms that have open attributes are then explored, whereby these terms are applied. In terms of design, the focus is specifically on the design of physical things rather than graphical, software or system design.

Crowdsourcing an emotional wardrobe

Selecting clothing online requires decision-making about sensorial experiences, but online environments provide only limited sensorial information. Inferences are therefore made on the basis of product pictures and their textual description. This is often unreliable as it is either based on the designers understanding of the product or deprived of perceptual content due to the difficulty of expressing such experiences. Using a purpose built website that combines and cross references multi-modal descriptive media, this study aims at investigating the possibility of using crowdsourcing mechanisms and multi-modal language to engage consumers in providing enriched descriptions of their tactile experiences of garments.