Computational weaving is an old form of HCI, where hand Jacquard machine weaving embodies rich interaction and digital computation. Low-cost Jacquard looms are becoming common in HCI, but they come with limitations due to technology standardization. Jacquard weaving looms are often customized to create different textile structures; in our case, 3D weaves. This research uses speculative itineration to investigate the iterative re-engineering of a low-cost computational Jacquard handloom. We rebuild and enhance an existing designed loom by co-constructing stories and conducting semi-structured interviews with novices and experts, allowing imaginaries to change the loom. Our findings reveal innovation potential across the spectrum of looms. Both novice and expert weavers seek looms that allow modification, driven by the potential for new weaving designs and design spaces of looms within digital craftsmanship. Itinerative co-constructive speculation allows for customized looms across skill levels, challenging prevailing paradigms where expertise level often dictates technology choice.

In this pictorial, we explore alternative ways of knowing urban trees through a more-than-human lens. Using a municipal tree dataset, we focus on “unknown” trees—entries unclassified due to error, decay, or absence—highlighting the limits of quantification and fixed knowledge systems. Urban trees, while critical for ecosystems, are often shaped by technological interventions (e.g., GIS, IoT sensors, AI diagnostics) that prioritize their utility over other expressions. We engage in knitting as a material inquiry to foreground nonhuman agencies and relational entanglements. Through reflective shifts and compromises, this project questions normative design practices, seeking to amplify nonhuman participation. We make two contributions. Firstly, we offer insights into fostering alternative, relational engagements with urban ecologies. Secondly, we reflect on our process of surfacing and working with agentic capacities, articulating guidance for other design researchers. Through this, we advocate for fragmented approaches that embrace complicity and complexity in more-than-human design.

As designers, we often use annotations to add information and reflection to our work. We would like to suggest that these annotations let personal design languages emerge. We experiment with the materiality of the pictorial format itself to show how such languages emerge from a particular body of work, as it travels from sketches, text, and various material artefacts. This emergent language uses annotations and layers as design materials, providing access to the nuances in the thinking behind our research and making processes. Through this language, the voice of the maker emerges revealing subjective and situated knowledges that would not be available otherwise. We reflect on these insights and share a set of strategies using annotations and layerings for others to use. As a result, we contribute an approach of annotations and layering to engage complexity when making, reflecting, and disseminating design research.

Fashion design has rapidly become a digital process where textiles are simulated as soft, conformable materials on a digital body. The embodied experience and physical interaction with the textile have been replaced by screen-based media, resulting in a gap in understanding between physical and digital textile material. Consequently, understanding digitized textile properties and characteristics has become challenging for practitioners. This research investigates fashion designers’ implicit understanding when selecting textiles, specifically how interactions with physical textiles influence design considerations. Twenty digital fashion designers interacted with ten physical textile materials via tangible and scientific drape measurements, reflecting upon their design considerations. In digital environments, a tangible understanding of material properties is vital, and scientific drape measurements add significant understanding to digital design. The research advances our understanding of integrating digital tools in textile and soft material practices, where a postphenomenological approach is employed to help formulate the design considerations in selecting materials.

This studio aims to collaboratively build foot augmentations, experiment with different materials and techniques, and create new designs for low-cost, wearable, and accessible devices that can be used by researchers, makers, designers, and artists. Considering the heightened focus on the human body with the rise of AR/VR/XR technologies, foot augmentation has great potential. To explore this potential, we invite researchers, designers and artists to share their applications, experiences, and ideas while designing foot augmentations. Participants will share knowledge, brainstorm ideas, and explore tools and materials for rapid prototyping. Finally, they will tinker and explore, discussing their design strategies to derive common approaches and best practices. Based on the hands-on session results, we will write a paper on design strategies for foot augmentation that will help facilitate more sustainable investigations and design of future foot interfaces.

In this pictorial, we offer an overview of the design and step-by-step guidance on crafting a leather self-tracking device for pollen allergies. We designed the device to support patients’ daily lives allowing them to track symptoms and their severity and medicine intake while on the go, multiple times per day. The self-tracker sends the data to an accompanying smartphone application to support patients in understanding their illness, be used in doctors’ consultation, and collect data for allergy research. We chose natural leather as a material for this domestic medical device due to its associations with everyday artifacts, so it would be easier to integrate it into allergy patients’ everyday lives.

Data is changing how we design consumer products. Shoe production is a prime example of this; foot size, footstep pressure and personal preferences can be used to design personalized shoes. Research done around metamaterials, programming materials and computational composites illustrate the possibilities of creating complex data & material relationships. These new relationships allow us to look at future products almost like software apps, becoming a kind of product service systems, where the focus is on its iterative personalization improvement over time. Can we create systems of such data driven objects that in turn allow us to design new objects that are informed by the data trail? In this paper we report on four RtD project iterations that explore this challenge and provide a set of insights on how to close this new iterative loop.

Wearable and e-textiles as a field has tended to overlook its own documentation, as notions and overarching ideas are developed over time and across individual projects. We would like to begin addressing this by charting the development of Digital Craftsmanship through a number of projects over time. Practically, we propose to show a small selection of garments and samples alongside a simple framework for future documentation of work.

Personalization of shoes is of increasing importance to designers, design researchers, and manufacturers as mass customization progresses towards ultra personalized product service systems. Many attempts have been made to design co-creation platforms that allow end users to personalize their own shoes. Those co-creation platforms primarily concentrate on color selection. This research takes a different approach and designs a toolkit for maker-oriented users to co-manufacture their own shoes. The toolkit was designed in different levels and deployed to makers via crowdsharing worldwide. Backers were surveyed before deployment and interviewed after two years to understand personalization over a larger amount of time with the research product. We find that users who have greater bespoke tools and materials in their toolkits are more likely to personalize their shoes while co-manufacturing. The research provides guidelines for researchers and designers creating toolkits, designing personalization product service systems/configurators and engaging in tangible bespoke processes.

This paper presents a structured survey of 119 publications from the proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) from 2013 to 2017. This survey on research methods and purposes is based upon a classification schema used by many others in HCI research. An extra dimension was added to the classification of research methods pertaining to the Research Domains, in order to provide a more insightful overview of the field. An analysis of the research methods and purposes, and domains of ISWC is presented. Additionally, the citation impact of ISWC publications is evaluated and compared over these dimensions. Current tendencies of the research presented at ISWC are identified with focus on the contextual setting of the research. Opportunities for future research at ISWC are identified.