as appropriate ways of field testing, interacting, and bringing all the stakeholders together.

What is one feature of your lab you want and do not have? Research on wearables can be done at the yarn level, the textile level, or the product/ garment level, and we believe that all of them are important. In Wearable Senses we work with existing off-the-shelf technologies, as one of our main research interests is how to bring technology closer to the body (research on a product/garment level).

We are currently starting to develop our own electronic components; having dedicated technology supports us in going further in the textile integration in order to do research on a textile level. However, we are still working with hard PCB boards. The next step is to get into flexible and printed ones.

What is most challenging about
the work you do here? From our
experience with the Wearable
Senses theme, it became increasingly
clear that there are at least three
challenges we need to tackle if
we want to effectively explore the
design opportunities related to
well-being. First, it is more difficult
than expected to move away from
traditional screen- and desktop-based
interaction metaphors. We need to
develop completely new and different
interaction styles, integrating bodily
actions, cognition, and perception,
and adopting theoretical frameworks
that support embodied action and
perception. Second, combining textiles
and electronics to create high-quality
and robust prototypes is technically
challenging and requires new solutions
and techniques that we cannot possibly
develop in our own labs. Third, we
find it is hard to predict the effect of
our designs on daily life and that we
need to develop effective approaches
to measure and evaluate our concepts
in the real-life context. The three
challenges—interaction styles for
close to the body, new collaboration
networks, and pools of in-situ tested
examples—gave direction to our
research efforts and determined the
emphasis of some of the research
projects that were initiated.
Creating an
approach for the
design of smart
textiles is almost
a design process
in itself.

DOI: 10.1145/2628193 COPYRIGH T HELD BY AUTHORS JULY–AUGUST 2014 INTERACTIONS 19 INTERACTIONS.ACM.ORG