Vasiliki Tsaknaki

This paper presents three scenario-based speculations accompanied by material explorations of soft IoT for smart homes based on humidity data. Cycle Lines tracks and displays weekly patterns of humidity levels shown as colored lines in a woven display, Relationscape, a real-time tracker and knitted display of humidity showing the relation between two different households, and Eco-collective, embroidery IoT that changes color depending on the humidity levels of different objects in the household. Based on first-person engagements with humidity sensors placed in the authors’ homes, they imagine new types of soft IoT devices that sense and display relations to humidity data, suggesting a role for mundane,craft-based IoT for smart homes. They express the relational nature of humidity and how it is tied to well-being in the home, among household members and other human and more-than-human inhabitants, as well as the environmental conditions inside and outside of the home. The soft, craft-based approach to imagining futures of IoT for smart homes has feminist commitments and invites for further problematizing domestic labor practices and craft activism in the domestic context.

Craft, being the skillful process of turning materials into artifacts, bears many similarities with interaction design as a practice of giving form to computational materials. Zooming into the studios of five craftspeople and through interviews with them, we unfold stories of the joys and struggles they encounter in their practices. Departing from these, we unpack and discuss how craft is a matter of care, using the notion of care by de la Bellacasa. We argue that the dual movements of care in the making and through the artifact are linked and that the ability to generate care through artifacts comes from the care with which they were made. We end with three suggestions of how craft as a matter of care can inspire the design of computational things, formulated as questions that invite reflection and suggest paths to designing technologies with a care commitment.

As new materials become available for textile and interaction designers, it is crucial that we develop an understanding of the lived experiences of such materials and explore meaningful contexts for their development. In this paper, we engage with systems in which bodies as materials and materials as bodies constitute an assemblage of vitalities in constant flux with one another. In particular, we address how such systems in their interactions with (non)human bodies blur boundaries between inside and outside the body, and between human and machine, acting as soft systems. Drawing on our first-person, design-led research, we present three design explorations of soft systems that deeply engage with the body: Breathing Wings, Fiddling Necklaces and Menarche Bits. We analyze how the three projects contribute towards what we conceptualize as “vibrant wearables”: wearables that through their material vibrancy surface design qualities of leakiness, characterized by a multi-directionality of “spilling over,” ongoingness, which attends to non-linear temporalities and cycles of life and death, and mutuality that emphasizes the interdependency, and becoming, of vibrant encounters. These three design qualities all conceptually trouble boundaries of bodies and materials and are practical resources for designers and researchers working with the body in/as a soft system. Our work offers concrete examples of how to work with material vibrancy, which is particularly relevant to new materialist discourses in textile, fashion and interaction design. We argue for the generativity of these design qualities for other designers and researchers aiming to elevate materials and soft systems in interactions with bodies. Moreover, we contribute towards design research that conceptually and materially troubles the boundaries of the body, and we argue for attending to the material power of (non)human bodies as a soft system.