Rapid Iron-On User Interfaces: Hands-on Fabrication of Interactive Textile Prototypes

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Contributors

Abstract

Rapid prototyping of interactive textiles is still challenging, since manual skills, several processing steps, and expert knowledge are involved. We present Rapid Iron-On User Interfaces, a novel fabrication approach for empowering designers and makers to enhance fabrics with interactive functionalities. It builds on heat-activated adhesive materials consisting of smart textiles and printed electronics, which can be flexibly ironed onto the fabric to create custom interface functionality. To support rapid fabrication in a sketching-like fashion, we developed a handheld dispenser tool for directly applying continuous functional tapes of desired length as well as discrete patches. We introduce versatile compositions techniques that allow for creating complex circuits, utilizing commodity textile accessories and sketching custom-shaped I/O modules. We further contribute a comprehensive library of components for input, output, wiring and computing. Three example applications, results from technical experiments and expert reviews demonstrate the functionality, versatility and potential of this approach.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Place of PublicationNew York, NY, USA
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York
Pages1–14
ISBN (print)978-1-4503-6708-0
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0003-1467-7031/work/142253351
ORCID /0000-0002-2176-876X/work/151435401

Keywords