Created by integrating wireless bluetooth technology with conductive and recycled textiles, this series of sewable, soft circuit music interfaces were designed to function as both instruments for digital performance and as surfaces to practice decorative hand-sewing on. Designed as part of a five month collaboration with artisan clothing designer Karen Glass, they are the result of an iterative design process which was influenced by the mission and studio technique of her sustainable fashion brand Zerowaste.
Through our work with Glass and her staff, we explored new possibilities for learning how to integrate computing into traditional handiwork crafts – and vice versa, creating a series of playable interactive prototypes. This project builds on the rich discourse within human computer interaction literature on practice-based and material exploration as well as hybrid computational and craft objects. This project was a collaboration with Tica Lin and Qin Li.
You can read more about the objects and our process in a paper published in proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction:
S.Schoemann, M. Nitsche, “Needle as Input: Exploring Practice and Materiality When Crafting Becomes Computing” TEI ’17: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. March 2017.