Three roles for textiles as tangible working materials in co-designprocesses

Abstract

Textiles are increasingly complex materials used in a growing number of applications, e.g. in architecture. The textile industry must therefore engage with other professions when developing both textiles and products of which textiles are a part. In this article, we argue that tools taken from the field of participatory design represent a potential for staging such co-design situations and report on our experience from a co-design process where architects, engineers and textile experts engaged in designing future textile solutions for Danish hospital environments. During this process we used what we call tangible working materials to stage the collaboration between the stakeholders engaged as co-designers. Our experience using the tangible working materials showed us that they can be divided into three types, with different attributes and roles in the design process: real, mediating and representative materials.

Keywords:

• tangible working materials
• tools and techniques
• textiles
• architecture
• co-design
• participatory design

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority for funding and all the workshop participants from Kvadrat and DNU (Det Nye Universitetshospital) Skejby for their time and enthusiasm. We would also like to thank our editors and reviewers as well as Eva Brandt for useful feedback on earlier versions of this article.