Project :: eTextile Toolkit for Textiles and Fashion Designers

eTextile Toolkit for Textile and Fashion Designers

The aim of this project is to provide a low entry threshold for fashion/textile designers who have no prior experience in electronics, to use e-textiles in their designs, whilst also supporting functions that require more complex circuitry. The toolkit includes modular electronic units, soft PCB, online sensor tutorials and a range of conductive materials. The sensor tutorials and soft PCB enable open-ended textile interface exploration, designers can choose their preferred conductive material, and design interfaces out of the raw material in context of their fashion/textile design.

By simplifying circuits and assembling components into units, the toolkit supports designer to independently create e-textiles within their fashion project, and its flexibility allows for rapid testing and prototyping that can contribute towards a better design result. Also, when the e-textile fashion project heads into a more sophisticated technical requirement, the toolkit might become a foundation of a more effective collaboration of designers and technologists.

The toolkit has been used by MA Textile Design, at Royal College of Art for their Futures 2020 project, on which all of the student designers has successfully made interactive textile projects independently using the toolkit. Their feedbacks towards the toolkit were “very easy to use”,”made the interactive technology much more accessible for their work”, "opened up a new dimension for textile design".

People

Mei Zhang
Nick Bryan-Kinns
Becky Stewart

Research Areas

Electronic textiles
Wearable
Embedded interative system
Interative technology
Toolkit