Development of a Toolkit for Creating Kinetic Garments Based on Smart Hair Technology

Although there are many kinetic garment artworks and studies (ex [3]), installing kinetic elements into garments is often difficult for people in the field of textile. The reason for this issue comes from the complexity of kinetic elements to be handled by such people. Thus, simple technology is required to enable those people to create new kinetic garment easily. In this project, we propose a simple toolkit that enables installing kinetic function to textiles. This toolkit is composed of Smart Hair(s), a fine, light weighted bending actuator, and an Arduino based microcomputer. The basic design of the proposed toolkit will be described. Furthermore, we held a workshop in cooperation with students who major in fashion and textile to investigate the effect of this toolkit.