RHYME member Birgitta Cappelen was invited to speak on this year’s ArcInTex conference in Gothenburg. The title of her lecture was “Designing Component Based Smart Textile” and concerned the ongoing work with developing textile solutions for 4th Generation of Co-creative Tangibles, named Polly. The idea is to combine perspectives from the Textile and Computational traditions into a new concept of Smart Textile. From the Textile tradition we have modular thinking in Patchwork were we reuse used materials into creating new artefacts. In our Folk Costume tradition we also have modular parts like the belt and chest part (in Norwegian “bringeduk“) which can be added, inherited and used in another costume. Development in Carpet Tile Industry, from being a material to a service provider, is also an important inspiration. In the Computational tradition we have the tradition of modularity and components in both hardware components and in different forms of Component based software architecture. In developing RHYME Co-creative tangibles, Polly, we use both these lines of thoughts to structure the Smart Textile vertically and horizontally. Horizontally as different surface areas of sensors and sensorially stimulating surfaces. Vertically as layers, from the textile surface and shape, via hardware components, different functions and services to the data protocols (USB, Twitter, TCP/IP ).
