Treesense is a modular play kit for children to engage with a tree’s experience of being in the world. It is modular and contains different elements: A round textile carpet with detachable felt leaves that can also be attached to the user’s body, interaction cards for guidance, and electronic elements to unlock interactivity. It invites children to collaboratively create an individual tree and enact its story throughout the four seasons. Recent research has defined a need for deepening the understanding of how to design meaningful interactions with/for children to engage with non-humans and nature. Treesense responds to this and invites more-than-human speculations on how trees experience their world.

Designing for interactive play brings new dimensions for play experience blended with digital and physical characteristics. Starting from the insights of two interactive soft toy projects, the authors explore interactive soft materials in designing for playfulness through a material-driven design approach. This can bring a new dimension in designing interaction for ludic experiences and reveal specific characteristics of soft materials. By combining somaesthetic and embodied design methods, the studio aims at exploring what makes soft materials playful. Moreover, it addresses how technology can enhance the playfulness of these materials and what kind of playful interaction scenarios can be imagined with interactive soft materials by involving the whole-body in the design process. The learnings from the studio will help the authors build a framework which shows the potential and describes the characteristics of interactive soft materials to create new tangible, embedded and embodied interactions for play.

In this pictorial we visualize the growth plan for an inspirational test-bed of smart textile product service systems. The goal of the test-bed is to inspire and inform the Dutch creative industries of textile, interaction and service design to combine their strengths and share opportunities. The pictures exemplify the characteristic tools, approaches and prototypes for three phases of growth: Incubation, Nursery and Adoption.