Example gelatin-based fibers produced using our biofiber spinning machine.
Smart textiles combine electronics with traditional textile forms, showing great promise in creating soft and flexible interactive systems for human-computer interaction and robotics. However, they also present significant sustainability challenges as they merge two substantial waste streams: textiles and electronics.
We wrote a paper in the hopes of contributing to sustainability efforts by focusing on the integration of biobased materials that are biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable in the design of smart textiles. We introduced a Desktop Biofibers Spinning Machine to enable smart textile innovators to explore biobased fibers (i.e., biofibers) and envision applications in sustainable smart textiles.
A diagram of the parts used to create the machine.
The paper cited below describes the machine’s design, a usage walkthrough, considerations for fiber spinning, and an exploration of various formulations to make gelatin biofibers. We provide several examples of biofibers integrated into smart textile applications. Finally, we discuss lessons learned from working with biofibers and the unique opportunities our machine brings to the fiber design space in Human Computer Interaction and beyond.
Team: Eldy Lazaro, Michael Rivera, Mirela Alistar, Laura Devendorf, Miles Lewis, Lily Gabriel. A collaboration between the Unstable Design Lab, Living Matter Lab, and Utility Research Lab.
Citation: Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Mirela Alistar, Laura Devendorf, and Michael L. Rivera. 2024. Desktop Biofibers Spinning: An Open-Source Machine for Exploring Biobased Fibers and Their Application Towards Sustainable Smart Textile Design. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 856, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642387
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.
An exploration into new mechanisms for jacquard weaving, as well as an ongoing interest in asking how non-human materials or forces can be engaged as collaborators resulted in the prototype of the wind loom—a modified tapestry loom that with every 4th warp connected to a sail that moves the warp position in and out. The fabrication of the loom was led by Jen Mah and Rachel Bork, who iterated between several prototypes for laser-cut heddle/hooks that can be attached to the yarn, arms are connected to umbrellas that can move when the wind blows, easily attachable and detachable components to support easy travel, and so on. The prototyping process was complex and frustrating, as the summer in which we prototyped was not very windy and it was hard to test in its specific working conditions we imagined for the loom. Local weaver, and friend, Julie Rodriguez, took the prototype out for a test and captured the photo above. Her approach was to wait for a gust, and then weave into the wind-produced shed with alternating colors that she chose.
The image above shows a detail of the arm design and how it connects to the warp yarns. First, a small piece of laser-cut acrylic attaches to the yarn. We cut a small “pig tail” in the acrylic to allow the small rectangular joint to be easily wound on and off the warp. That piece then fits into an arm that pivots around a post along the width of the loom. That arm has a long thin aluminum post attached to the back of it, upon which a we attach umbrellas made with nylon and 3D printed attachment joints. The length of the aluminum post determines the speed a which the umbrella will move. The longer the post, the weaker the wind. We found the weakest wind we could capture was roughly 6 mph. We originally had a second 3D printed joint between the metal post and the umbrella post (seen below) but this added to much weakness into the joint and became unruly in a wind gust. All of our part files and instructions can be found on this Instructables post: https://www.instructables.com/id/Wind-Loom/
The goal of this one-day workshop is to open space for disruptive techniques and strategies to be used in the making, prototyping, and conceptualizations of the artifacts and systems developed and imagined within human-computer interaction (HCI). Specifically, this workshop draws on strategies from art, speculative design, and activism, as we aim to productively “trouble” the design processes behind HCI. We frame these explorations as “disruptive improvisations” — tactics artists and designers use to make the familiar strange or creatively problematize in order to foster new insights. The workshop invites participants to inquire through making and take up key themes as starting points to develop disruptive improvisations for design. These include modesty, scarcity, uselessness, no-technology, and failure. The workshop will produce a zine workbook or pamphlet to be distributed during the conference to bring visibility to the role these tactics of making in a creative design practices.More information: https://disruptiveimprovisation.wordpress.com/
In an effort to foster more productive collaborations between artists and engineers, Laura Devendorf and Daniela Rosner convened a workshop titled “Weaving Disciplines: Fostering Productive Collaborations between Artists and Engineers” at the ATLAS Institute on Oct 8, 2017. We had a very special guest, Pamela Liou, who came from New York to talk about her explorations creating a desktop digital jacquard loom and other adventures in textile experimentation. Attendees were associated with Art, Aerospace Engineering, and Computer Science at CU Boulder; SparkFun Electronics; The Boulder Public Library; and the Schacht Spindle Company. The event was sponsored by the ATLAS Institute and Research and Innovation Office at CU Boulder. Topics for discussion included the state of the art in spacesuit design, ideas for addressable, self-healing, and temperature regulating fabrics, smart textiles community events, collaborating with ghosts, and the pleasure of working side-by-side when weaving with others.
Published at Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2017. This paper describes how the metaphor of the hybrid shapes how we imagine the future of technology. Drawing on feminist technoscience, We propose the alternative metaphor of coproductions to provoke visions for human-technology futures.
