Touchcraft is the work of Lucie Hernandez, a researcher and educator exploring playful, artistic approaches to interactive, smart textiles to tell stories and co-create multi-sensory experiences. Her work focuses on hybrid craft processes, material qualities, reuse and repair skills to facilitate projects that explore new human-material relations. She has a background in human-computer interaction, designing tangible interfaces for embodied interaction and developing tools and technologies to encourage more responsible, sustainable approaches to textiles and clothing. Lucie’s PhD research combined the dynamic properties of computation with textiles to demonstrate the possibilities for technological materials to extend sense perceptions and suggest new design contexts.
In previous projects, Lucie addressed sustainable practices for interactive textiles in environmental and social contexts for WEAR Sustain, an EU Horizon 2020 Research and Development Programme, promoting the co-development of ethical and sustainable wearable technologies and e-textiles. She used the opportunity to develop a socially engaged design practice to work cooperatively with a broad range of people and involve them in the design process. Lucie’s work revealed the value in developing co-produced design outcomes and processes with digital technologies, exploring attitudes to sustainable behaviour, imagining future scenarios with groups of users in the co-design of products and services.
Research Funding
VOICE, Valorising Artist-led Innovation through Citizen Engagement (2024-25)
Smart Sock Feasibility Study, EPIC eHealth & Productivity and Innovation in Cornwall and Isles of Scilly (2021-22)
Repair Generations, Crowdfunding Campaign, supported by Climate Challenge, Cornwall Council (2021)
Touchcraft, WEAR Sustain, EU Horizon 2020 Research and Development Programme (2018)
PhD Studentship, 3D3 Centre for Doctoral Training (AHRC), Falmouth University (2014-18)
Current and Recent Projects
2024-25
VOICE, Valorising Artist-led Innovation through Citizen Engagement. This project brings artists together with different groups and communities to work together to create green and digital solutions.
2024-ongoing
E-Stitches collective. Working with Sara Robertson and Emma Wright
2021-22
Repair Generations is a collective of designers, makers and menders that run workshops to connect people in the community to repair our clothes. With Sara Clasper and Sarah Perry
Crowdfund Campaign, supported by Cornwall Climate Challenge.
lucie f hernandez (at) gmail dot com