an array of forms created with biofoam, a foam-like form created from gelatin
Each new material developed opens a broader pallet of aesthetic and functional possibilities for designers. This paper demonstrates biofoam, a material that is water-soluble, biodegradable, and can be made conductive. We describe the material in detail: the process of making the material from scratch, the material’s fabrication into forms with hand-craft techniques, and present two HCI specific applications of the biofoam. The biofoam can be cooked, molded, layered, extruded, dissolved or recooked opening up possibilities to consider the entire life cycle of the material in the design process. We contribute design considerations to allow designers to “tune” the biofoam to the desired quality, as well as a characterization of many aspects of the biofoam such as compression, spring back time, water permeability, and electrical conductivity. Finally, we discuss the unique opportunities this material and its life cycle bring to the design and HCI communities.
Citation: Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Netta Ofer, Shanel Wu, Mary Etta West, Mirela Alistar and Laura Devendorf. 2022. Exploring Biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1525-1529. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533494 (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia).
Recently, LOOMIA and the Unstable Design Lab jointly ran a survey that asked people working in e-textiles (or more broadly, “electronics + textiles”) how they liked to talk about their work. LOOMIA is a flexible electronics start-up creating prototyping components for creative technologists, designers, and all sorts of e-textiles folks, hence the interest in how we label e-textiles and related work. LOOMIA has posted on their blog about the differences and overlaps between terms like “e-textiles”, “smart textiles”, and “functional fabrics”, but we wanted to test some theories about how people are actually using these terms.
The survey asked people to think about the following terms:
E-textiles
Smart textiles
Functional fabrics
Soft circuits
Flexible circuits/devices
FHE (Flexible Hybrid Electronics)
Stretchable electronics
Participants were asked which terms they had heard of, if they preferred or disliked any on the list, and if they saw any differences between the terms. They could also add any terms that we had missed.
We received a wide variety of responses, representing a range of age, genders, nationalities, experience levels, and professional backgrounds!
Demographics
Total Participants – 63
0 years of e-textile experience – 21 1+ years of e-Textile experience – 42
Gender – Female (28), Male (33), Non-Binary (2)
Age – 18 to 75
Occupation – Homemaker to CEO
In particular, the terms “e-textiles” and “flexible hybrid electronics” seemed to stand at two extremes of a language spectrum.
Breakdown of self-identified career paths of participants: 20 creative technologists (32%), 19 engineers (30%), 24 who indicated other paths (38%)
Findings
30/63 did not like Stretchable Electronics
26/63 did not like Soft Circuits
31/63 did not like Flexible Hybrid Electronics
17/63 did not like Flexible Circuits and Devices
14/63 did not like Functional Fabrics
17/63 did not like Smart Textiles
5/63 did not like E-Textiles
Because we also collected demographic information on participants’ career paths and asked them to categorize their own work, we wanted to see if there were any differences between the disciplines represented in our field. The main categories were “engineer”, “creative technologist”, or “artist/craftsperson”, but participants also added “venture capital”, “HR”, “textile designer”, and other roles.
What Engineers Liked
7/19 liked E-textiles/Smart Textiles (tied)
3/19 liked Flexible Hybrid Electronics
2/19 liked Soft Circuits
What Creative Technologists Liked
18/20 liked E-Textiles
10/20 liked Smart Textiles
7/20 liked Soft Circuits
5/20 liked Functional Fabrics
2/20 liked Flexible Hybrid Electronics
What Other Careers Liked
8/24 liked Smart Textiles
7/24 liked E-Textiles
2/24 liked Stretchable Electronics
1/24 liked Soft Circuits
Digging deeper into our data, many participants generously gave time to answer some free-response questions on their language associations with “e-textiles” or “flexible hybrid electronics”. By and large, people were concerned about future e-textiles/flexible device products being washable, both as an essential criteria for usability and as a technical challenge to overcome with new materials.
Language Associations
Q: What do you believe are essential features or descriptors of future e-textiles/flexible electronics? (For example: thin, washable, soft, etc.)
Word cloud of all participants’ responses to the question. Larger font size means a higher frequency in responses. Red words indicate “anti” features where participants mentioned what they didn’t want.
Q: What sort of products do you associate with flexible or wearable devices? These can be existing products or future hopes.
Word cloud of all participants’ responses to the question, with some grouping into certain topics (e.g. “monitoring” and “tracking data” were grouped into “tracking/surveillance”). Larger font size means a higher frequency of the word/topic, while colors are randomized.
We also see some interesting disagreements about how much the “e-textiles / smart fabrics” label overlapped with the “flexible / wearable” label. While most people said that they’re either related or even nested categories, a minority of respondents associated the two with different materials or fabrication techniques. A key quote from a dissenting opinion:
“fabrics are made of fibers that can easily be manipulated whereas flexible and wearable devices are made of plastics or hard materials”
anonymous survey respondent
which points out that many of our current wearable devices like smartwatches don’t use fabrics (or if they do, there aren’t integrated electronics in the fabric).
Conclusion
Returning to our initial hypothesis, it seems that our hunch was wrong about engineers preferring terms with “circuits” or “electronics” over terms that focused on “textiles”! But the data shows a much more nuanced picture of how people are thinking about the future of e-textile technologies. We see folks grappling with using language that is specific and descriptive (e.g. “electronics” implies semiconductor devices and the associated materials and processes, while “textiles” implies yarns/fiber and knitting/weaving/felting/etc.) versus language that is general and accessible. Broad terms like “e-textiles” and putting the “smart” label before a product category are easily understood by a general audience, but for those working within the industry, these terms can become “buzzwords” which are vague and unhelpful for describing the technical details of their work.
We presented these initial findings and analyses in a webinar, hosting a town-hall-style discussion with interested survey respondents. Again, there was a diverse range of experiences in the virtual room. Speaking face to face, we wanted to get the room thinking about their language use when talking to others in e-textiles. Since the survey focused on people’s language use within their own professional contexts, we were especially interested in any experiences that people had collaborating across disciplines when working in e-textiles. From one participant on the differences in working with textile engineers vs. electrical engineers:
“textile engineers tend to have a broader perspective as they can see concrete applications (wearables / clothing). Whereas [electrical engineers] may be a little more broad technically: e.g. use of flexible circuits in detecting stretch.”
anonymous webinar attendee
While our dataset is by no means comprehensive, these survey results were a fascinating exploratory poke into the interdisciplinary nature of the emerging e-textiles field and the future of its industry. We hope that sharing these findings will help us all to speak across professions and consider different perspectives, particularly in collaborative settings, when discussing soft, flexible, and textile based circuits of all shapes and sizes.
We’d like to shout out the following people for their contributions and thoughtful responses:
Ricardo O’Nascimento
Andrea C
Robert Tietze
Vicente Jorge Sanchis Rico
J.J.M Geurts
Michelle Farrington
Jim Stathis
Lina Stephens
Radoslav Hanic
Charlie Lindahl
Amy Jenkins
Darryl
Md Mehdi Hasan
Qianwen Yu
Lori Ann Wahl
Michael Stewart
@cooolrunnings
Pranav Sai
James Ochieng
Eddie Yam (Intertek HK)
Gil M
Muhammed Tawhidur Rahman
Bobby Bedi
Collaboration
If you’d like to learn more about LOOMIA’s side of this collaboration, please check out their website and blog (where this article was also posted). You can also learn more about their founder and our main collaborator on this study, Maddy Maxey.
A Fabric that remembers is a fabric that remembers how and when it was pressed. It does this using 6 embedded pressure sensors and a microconroller that trasmits data to the web. It is a fabric with its own website, which you can explore here:
The fabric is currently on display at Accenture Labs in San Francisco and uses both the fabric and tablet to visualize touch in realtime. The constraint that guided the work was to get as much of the circuitry as possible embedded into the fabric. Thus, for the e-textiles nerds out there, you might be happy to know that all of the wiring for the resistive sensing and voltage dividing is embedded into the fabric by way of using different resistance yarns. We have included all of the swatches I made in preparation for the final design for reference.
Authors on this project are Laura Devendorf, Sasha De Koninck, Shanel Wu and Emma Goodwill.
This image shows the fabric as it would be rendered as a circuit. The structure consists of six voltage dividing circuits wired in parallel to a common power and ground. The first resistor is a fixed value resistor and the second is a variable resistor that changes measure with the application of force.The fabric on view at the Center for Heritage Arts and Textiles (CHAT) in Hong Kong as part of the “Interweaving Poetic Code” exhibit.
Unfabricate is a project that anticipate the future of e-waste compounding with textile waste. Shanel Wu leverages the quality of textiles as being adhesive-less to envision new methods for designing smart textiles for disassembly.
In 2017, the Unstable Design Lab received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop AdaCAD, a software tool that would facilitate weavers who needed to integrate circuitry into their design.
This post includes a transcript of our first presentation about AdaCAD, delivered at CHI 2019. In this presentation, we talk about the rationale, process, and features of AdaCAD. Long story short, we presented how we learned that providing specific support for multilayer weaving and viewing your weave in terms of the draft as well as the paths of the individual yarn types within the design could go far to support weavers, and non-weavers, entering this emerging design space.
Since giving the talk in 2018, we have contributed development and you can view our current documentation and use the tool here: https://unstabledesign.github.io/
