Computational Textiles and E-Fashion
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Recent research on new media has focused on understanding how young people are adopting sophisticated tools and methods for responding to media through creative production, including youth’s playing and making of video games, creating videos and animations, and contributing to and participating in massive virtual communities. While these activities have received considerable attention, current research tends to overlook dimensions of digital media that impact youth’s activities beyond the screen: namely, those aspects of media construction and design that dovetail with hands-on crafts, physical construction and design, and material play.
This relatively new landscape in the physical world suggests a vast extension of the traditional notion of digital learning — an extension that can enrich youth's expressive and intellectual lives by combining the affordances of the virtual world with those of tangible media designs and creations. We argue that as today’s notions of "media texts" are expanding beyond print to encompass dress, speech, drawing, and dance, we need to consider how engagement with digital media can include tangible media texts.
Our research focuses on one particularly promising application of tangible media texts called computational crafts and electronic textiles (e-textiles). These include young people's design of programmable garments, accessories (such as jacket patches), and costumes. Such designs incorporate elements of embedded computing (for controlling the behavior of fabric artifacts), novel materials (e.g., conductive fibers or Velcro, etc.), sensors (e.g., light and sound), and actuators (e.g., LEDs and speakers), in addition to traditional aspects of fabric crafts.What follows is a series of 'worked examples' that have engaged the DIY, youth, and research communities alike. A simple sewn circuit project is presented first as an introduction to the materials, followed by a computationally enhanced wearable computer project that uses a small LED display to create a POV wristband, and lastly applications using wearable computers to teach young children about complex systems through game play is presented.
Overview
What are we doing?
Computational textiles—textile artifacts that contain embedded computers or are computationally generated—can capture youths’ pre-existing interests in new media, fashion, and design while supporting learning and creativity in computer science, arts, design, and engineering fields. Computational textiles are part of a small but growing and lively body of research investigating innovative ways to blend computation with traditional crafts (Eisenberg, 2005, 2002; Buechley et al., 2006). We believe that computational textiles have several features that make them especially compelling to young people in our target age group, namely teenagers and “tweens” (10-13 year olds). Fashion plays a vital role in the lives of many, but particularly in the lives of youth, who are discovering and defining their identities, identities that are publicly announced through their clothes and accessories (Moje, 2000; Sefton-Green & Reiss, 1999). Electronic devices—mobile phones for example—are increasingly significant fashion accessories, functioning as status symbols both through their monetary value and their ability to advertise social connections (Jenkins et al., 2006).
What is the LilyPad Arduino?
The LilyPad Arduino kit enables novice engineers
and designers to embed electronic hardware into textiles (Buechley,
2006a; Buechley et al., 2008; Buechley & Eisenberg, 2008). The LilyPad
Arduino kit (Figure 2) is a set of sewable electronic components, including
a programmable microcontroller and an assortment of sensors and actuators
that allows users to build their own soft wearable computers. Users
sew LilyPad modules together with conductive thread. To define the behavior
of constructions, users employ the popular Arduino development environment,
enabling them to program the LilyPad microcontroller to manage sensor
and output modules employed in their designs (Joliffe, 2006; Arduino,
web-2008). The LilyPad was released as a commercial product in October
2007 (SparkFun, web-2008). Since then it has been widely adopted by designers
and engineers of all ages from around the world. It is now sold in several
countries and it has been employed in a number of universities in computer
science, engineering, art and design courses.
Using computational textiles to offer a first person
perspective of a complex system is a really interesting idea. It appears that the use of this technology
allows further insight into the capacity of young children to think complexly,
while simultaneously affirms Vygotsky’s notion of ZPD. From this example, there seems to be a link
between one’s perspective or position within an activity system, and the rate
at which they move through their ZPD. In
particular, when one is engaging within the system (key functioning mechanism
of the system where their participation holds consequential implications to the
overall process), do they start to think in fundamentally different ways.
From using BeeSim, have students displayed qualitative differences
in the way they think about other complex systems?
What are some of the common misconceptions of
circuitry? How does teaching circuitry
though computational textiles help overcome these misconceptions?
I think it is great that you are creating opportunities for females to engage with
circuitry. In particular, does the engineering literature support the lack of female participation in engineering to a fundamental quantitative difference in capacity between men and women's fluency in engineering, or have dominate
cultures simply favored men as engineers over women?
The BeeSim puppet helped children explore their first complex system by
using this technology, therefore other systems have not yet been
explored as of this date. More can be read about the original study in
the paper The BeeSim Game: Leveraging Wearable Computers in
Participatory Simulations with Young Children which can be downloaded
at: http://www.joshuadanish.com/pubs/p246-peppler.pdf
According to research, there are multiple & complex reasons why the engineering field is lacking female engineers, however a difference between gender capacity for fluency is not one of them. The question of female compatibility within a preexisting “engineering” culture may be more inline with one possible reason why females opt to choose other careers.