This pictorial explores textile-specific interaction and various signifiers to communicate them. In a textile workshop, nine designers created 50 samples of potential interfaces, based on everyday actions people perform with textiles and with a specific focus on signifiers. The samples were analysed and categorized as annotated portfolios, which revealed three categories of signifiers relevant to textile-specific interaction design: Visual signifiers, Textile signifiers, and Staging signifiers. The pictorial offers more details on each category and further discusses the Staging category. Following the annotations, a subset of the textile samples from the workshop was further explored in an exploration session to gain insights into users' perceptions and interpretations of signifiers and interactions. The paper concludes with a high-level reflection on the use of signifiers in textile-specific interaction design, as well as considerations for future designers of smart textile interfaces.

This pictorial explores the design space for communicating surface gestures to users of textile interfaces by experimenting with the interfaces’ physical design and affordances. First, we created a collection of functional and non-functional textile samples. Their development was based on three aspects: design, fabrication, and sensing. The design aspect covered different visual (shape, color) and haptic (details, textures) designs, fabrication explored three textile-specific fabrication methods, and electronic sensing offered options for adding touch-sensing capabilities. Second, we reflected on created samples and their characteristics contrasting different designs and speculating on why some work better than others. Our main findings and insights are presented in five clusters: ergonomics, visual affordances, perception of textures, the direction of movement, and the economic usage of design elements. This intermediate-level knowledge can provide a starting point for each professional or novice designer to take inspiration from, when creating their own textile user interfaces.

As smart textiles are becoming more present in our lives, investigating and designing textile interfaces has started getting more and more attention. Still, very little research has been done on how to design interactive elements for non-wearable textile interfaces for the best recognition, perception, and interaction. In this paper, we present initial assumptions for designing such interfaces, which we derived from working intensively with our partners from the industry. These have been further explored with experts from the field during interviews, and finally tested in a user study. As a conclusion of the study, we define five design recommendations for textile interfaces and present several prototypes that demonstrate them in practice. Our recommendations cover tactile contrast between textures, heights, and shapes; minimal recognizable size of elements; perception of concave and convex shapes as interactive elements; indication of interaction through shape; and recognition of tactile symbols.