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Jones, Lee and Awad, Ahmed and Koelle, Marion and Nabil, Sara

Booktitle

Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Abstract

The ‘material turn’ in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is increasingly drawing attention to the computational affordances of materials and how we can craft with them. In this paper, we explore opportunities for combining the maker cultures of hand spinning with e-textile crafting. In our first study, we interviewed 32 hand spinners on their practices to better understand their motivations for spinning their own yarns and the techniques they use to do so. In our second study, we conducted workshops with 6 spinners at a local spinning guild, where participants worked with the conductive fibers and spun e-textile yarns. After the workshops, we conducted follow-up interviews with each participant to understand the opportunities and tensions of hand spinning e-textile yarns. Our findings show how spinners can blend local materials with conductive ones to develop their own custom interactive textiles, and the mismatch between how these fibers are sold and what information spinners require to inform their design decisions. Through these results, we hope to empower makers and inspire the design community to develop tools to support these DIY practices.

Publishing date

2024

Type of Publication

inproceedings

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Series

DIS '24

Pages

1–19

Projects

Digitopias
DIGItal TechnOlogies for Participation and InterAction in Society - Digital Technologies for Participation and Interaction in and with Society

Doi

10.1145/3643834.3660717