A transdisciplinary collaborative journey leading to sensorial clothing

ABSTRACT

Recent science funding initiatives have enabled participants from a diverse array of disciplines to engage in common spaces for developing solutions for new wearables. These initiatives include collaborations between the arts and sciences, fields which have traditionally contributed very different forms of knowledge, methodology, and results. However, many such collaborations often turn out as science communication and dissemination activities that make no concrete contribution to technological innovation. Magic Lining, a transdisciplinary collaborative project involving artistic and scientific partners working in the fields of e-textile design, cognitive neuroscience and human-computer interaction, creates a shared experiential knowledge space. This article focuses on the research question of how a transdisciplinary collaborative design processinvolving material explorations, prototyping, first-person-perspective and user studies, can lead to the creation of a garment that invites various perceptual and emotional responses in its wearer. The article reflects on the design journey, highlighting the transdisciplinary team’s research through design experience and shared language for knowledge exchange. This process has revealed new research paths for an emerging field of ‘sensorial clothing’, combining the various team members’ fields of expertise and resulting in a wearable prototype.

KEYWORDS:

• Art-science
• transdisciplinary
• collaboration
• e-textiles
• body-perception
• multisensory
• haptics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the VERTIGO project as part of the STARTS program of the European Commission, based on technological elements from the project Magic Shoes (grant PSI2016-79004-R, Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad of Spain, AEI/FEDER). The work was also supported by the project Magic outFIT, funded by the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (PID2019-105579RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033). Aleksander Väljamäe’s work was supported by the Estonian Research Council grant PUT1518; and Ana Tajadura-Jiménez’s work was supported by RYC-2014–15421 grant, Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad of Spain.