Negotiating Ambiguity in Describing Fabrics Through Technology

Abstract

Designers using tangible materials like fabric may have a limited verbal language to describe the embodied experience of feeling the material. Taxonomies exist for materials like fabric, but are not served by the population of designers we studied. How can technology be designed to better explore fabric, yet not diminish any existing ambiguities in description? We chose to study both different ways to represent the fabric and different interface designs to explore fabric. We collected many descriptors, in part by crowdsourcing, and asked how designers explored fabric, leveraging off of existing practices. We designed interfaces to evaluate a designer's understanding of fabric, with the goal to provide design guidelines on how to design interfaces with ambiguous-important domains.