Petreca, Baurley and Bianchi-Berthouze’s study was written to explore how designers feel textiles as a case study to support technological developments to replicate a tactile experience. This article provided inspiration for my project for consideration of how students could become familiar with fabrics, increasing their knowledge and ultimately employability skills.
‘In this paper, we use textiles as a case study to investigate how we can get people to talk about this experience, and to understand what may be important to consider when designing technology to support it.’ (Petreca, Baurley and Bianchi-Berthouze, 2015).
The fashion industry commonly referrers to the experienced feeling and touch of fabrics as having a ‘textile hand’. Petreca, Baurley and Bianchi-Berthouze , describe them as ‘the sensations and impressions resulting from interaction with textiles’.
This can also be considered as the language of how designers and others involved in product development of clothing describe fabrics. Graduates of buying and merchandising courses are required to have developed the language of how to describe fabrics and this can be achieved through exposure to a wide range of textiles through object-based learning.
Students will need to improve skills related to the feel of fibres and fabrics, identifying the composition, fabric properties and suitability for a garment, as discussed in the case study; ‘Designers performed diverse touch behaviour according to the property they were investigating, e.g. hold by the corner to see how it falls (drape), squeeze and/or drop to feel weight (e.g. in the extract below), shake or stroke to feel temperature (warm, cool, fresh, and so on), pull to feel its resistance (weak or strong), touch around the edges to understand size’.
The initial phase of developing the ‘textile hand’ can be considered as having the knowledge and experience of textiles, the construction and origins.
Bibliography
Petreca, B., Baurley, S. and Bianchi-Berthouze, N. (2015) ‘How do designers feel textiles?’, in 2015 International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII). 2015 International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), Xi’an, China: IEEE, pp. 982–987. doi: 10.1109/ACII.2015.7344695.