I Feel You: Exploring possibilities to create touch-responsive woven textiles imitating living beings

Abstract

I Feel You is a speculative textile design project looking into the possibilities to create multi-sensory electronic textiles that imitate living beings. The theme of textile surfaces imitating living beings has emerged from yearning for touching and closeness: During the global pandemic and the ongoing wave of extinction, I imagined a world where we are increasingly physically separated from each other and other animals. What if, in the future, we are accompanied by robot pets and people? Against this backdrop, this work speculates on how textiles could create an illusion of being close to another living being and being touched by a living creature. The series of textile pieces consists of Jacquard woven multilayered textiles that, when combined with electronics, react to the human touch. The materials include linen, cotton, responsible mohair, wool, and silver-based electrically conductive threads. Together and separately the materials and woven structures strive to create multisensory, touchable worlds. The aim of the study was to discover what kinds of textile surfaces humans can identify through the sense of touch, what kind of touch is experienced as soothing, and how to bring reactivity that imitates living beings into woven textiles. This knowledge was used as a basis to create a series of speculative woven electronic textile pieces that react to touch. Traditional materials and techniques interweave with new technologies creating possibilities to design new types of interactions with textiles. When designing active haptic textile surfaces, traditional properties of textiles, such as materials, patterns, and woven structures cannot be separated from the design process, where all the aspects entangle and affect each other.