Touch Craft facilitates people in community group settings to explore “methods of embedding stories into textiles” as a way to engage them in innovative technology and contribute towards social cohesion and wellbeing. The project was conceived by artist Lucie Hernandez, and co-produced with developer Edwin Love. They designed soft textile-technology pieces together with local crafters, and facilitated workshops working with Arts Well to encourage participants to utilise the multi-sensory capabilities of e-textiles (visual, tactile) and electronics (sound, visual, tactile) for storytelling. Their approach is grounded in co-creation and participatory textile making to empower communities to share skills, build social connections and create community resilience to make positive change in the face of the climate crisis.
Evaluation and Reflection
Touch Craft initiated two strands of work during the six-month WEAR funding period. The first strand aimed to prototype ideas for commercial e-textile products for interior settings. The second was a series of community workshops, which explored the concept co-defining e-textile pieces with each community group. Workshops resulted in two pieces: Story Blanket and Sensory Cushions as emerging outcomes to the co-creative processes.
The value of community crafting for participants health and well-being emerged as the
main benefit of the project. The artist observed that multi-sensory engagement with the crafted object “enabled people to engage on a deep level” and express personal stories, memories and local nature-related themes through the innovative textile-technology materials.
The artist mentioned that e-textiles have not yet been around long enough to assess if crafted objects can embody similar meaning to people as traditionally crafted artefacts do, however points out that the process was similar: using personal storytelling, defining a purpose to construct meaningful, personalised outputs.
Participants reflected positively on collaboration, multi-sensory materials and meaning to personal memory. One participant describes their experience:
“I was interested in the combination of sound and touch and feel, so the whole kind of concept behind the project”. Another participant, “I love working like this, and especially working with these embroidery silks, it takes me right back, granny showing me how to split the threads.”
Identifying the communities both as “participants and producers”, Touch Craft saw the benefit on “small-scale processes, local production”, ”nurturing an emphasis on slowness, valuing present time, re-skilling through shared knowledge, learning and co-creation”. They frame this as “durable
practices” (see also Chapman, 2009) and observed that “through the act of cooperating and participating directly, people increased in confidence and developed their creativity and imagination”.
At the end of the WEAR Sustain funding period, six participants tested the sensory sound cushions in their home environment for a week. This approach allowed the artist to study the impact of responsive objects within everyday life. Assessing the use, attachment, features and performance of textile-technology objects over a longer period of time can result in unpredictable, surprising outcomes. After returning the object each participant was asked to complete a short questionnaire to determine how enjoyable the experience was, whether the cushions had the ability to alter mood or prompt thought associations, frequency of use, efficiency of functional features.
Our project responded to the Social and Workplace Ethics theme to:
- Promote active involvement of people: Embedding technology in communities’ interests through crafts
- Advocate for community requirements and personalise functionality
- Create security and future resilience for groups activities through business models and profit reinvestment
The project responded to the Environmental Sourcing and Life-cycle theme to provide clear links to:
- Circular design: Community determines best practices for reuse and repair
- Design for attachment: Develop a relationship with products, reducing replacement
- Maintenance training: Actively involving beneficiaries in repair activities.
References
Greinke B., Sametinger F., Baker C., Bryan-Kinns N., Hernandez L., Ranaivoson H. Social sustainability approaches in electronic textiles crafts communities, 2019.
Hernandez, L. Introducing a Framework for Crafting E-Textiles: Exploring a Material Investigation into Technology, Journal of Textile Reserach and Practice, Taylor and Francis, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/20511787.2021.1994207