Full-body Textile Interfaces

In February 2025, we gave a one-day workshop at the TEI25 conference in Bordeaux (France) on the topic of full-body interactions with smart textile interfaces.

We encouraged participants to develop full-body interfaces with textiles to explore alternative and more embodied ways people could interact with smart textile technologies. We provided textile materials at the start of the workshop, and they included various shapes, sizes, colours, and material properties.

The exercises included (1) choosing a textile and exploring its material properties, (2) imagining body-textile actions, (3) combining actions with another participant, (4) finding meaning by considering users, input, output, and context, (5) allowing another participant to find meaning behind the action, and (6) role playing to try and find tricks, hacks, and incorrect uses with somebody else’s actions. These exercises were chosen to encourage participants to ideate interactions by focusing on materials and the body. All of them were designed for open exploration of various ideas, and only after completing them all, participants chose the interactions and meanings that they liked most. They continued with prototyping and finally explained them in a short round of presentations.

The workshop resulted in five outcomes: 1) Musical cleaner makes music while you clean the floor with your feet (by Kathrin), 2) Drinking prevention is a strap that physically restrains your hand when you want to drink alcohol (by Sosuke), 3) Phone case can be turned inside out to change into "Do not disturb" mode (by Kathrin), 4) Backrest control can be controlled with your elbows to change the position of your seat (by Haicheng), and 5) Foot massage are knee pads that relaxes you when you rub your feet on them (by Sara).