During day:

~~Add Brooklyn Metalworks exhibit to my Artist CV.~~

E-ink display

~~Order new stepper motor (is there a smaller one?)~~

~~Glue magnet to stepper arrow.~~

~~Buy 3D printer - to the floor.~~

~~Email my advisor from thesis feedback~~

Add screenshots from yesterday to my portfolio + text on desire for Jewelry.

Book office hours with Kate (she’s back in person in February)
Add Time zine notes to blog doc

Ask for lessenmf website for conductive heat pad.

How do I place copper using the laser cutter to make an actual circuit?

Matrices (like what I did for Touch Grass - it’s a soft circuit!)

Post class

~~Take picture of my Time prototype~~

Choose Bodily Politics Topic & create project to do over weekend.

Magnets & Radiowaves are things Kate finds really cool.

Next steps

Go to Bobst Library
There are shiny materials that look like they should conduct but they don’t. Would be fun for TIME Ferrofluid Clock to have a layer of conductive material around the clock that is part of the circuit.

Q: Any fabrics that are magnetic? So you can drag time.

Stainless steel conductive Fiber - #TIME?
Would be fun to figure out a way to sew together or loop through together LEDs in a circular shape to form a screen! Woven together?

For VIP - I wanna learn to use the machine so I can create a knitted screen. Would be fun if it was a tube that from all sides displays same pixel coloring!

Concepts

Prev Projects: Soft sensing for people of different ages.

Jacquard by Google.

Adidas Bra

There’s been a lot of examples of sensing in beds.

Resisting materials.

Cars have become more sensorific with sensors in seats.

Maggie Orth → at the Media Lab. Knitting conductive materials.

Started company called International Fashion Machines.

Using textiles to control lighting in a room.

Jessica Hemmings – Maggie Orth interview

Leah Buechley - created Lily Pad, manufactured by SparkFun due to being in the same city.

Ran a group at Media Lab called Low High Tech.

Physical Proximity matters a lot.

The Kobakant duo → follow a post early and often model. Now based in Berlin

Becky Stern is in the know & provides really great

Jie Qi: Paper circuits and created a company called Chibitronics.

Developed circuit stickers. #THESIS

Madison Maxey with Loomia.

Bibliography for the course

ACM Library - https://dl-acm-org.proxy.library.nyu.edu/

Genova, Aneta, and Katherine Moriwaki. Fashion and Technology: A Guide to Materials and Applications. Fairchild Books, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc, New York, 2016.

Guler, Sibel D. Crafting Wearables: Blending Technology with Fashion. Apress, New York, 2016.

Hartman, Kate, Make: Wearable Electronics (2nd edition), Maker Media, 2025.

Horvath, Joan C., Lyn Hoge, and Rich Cameron. Practical Fashion Tech: Wearable Technologies for Costuming, Cosplay, and Everyday. Apress, Berkeley, California, 2016.

Pailes-Friedman, Rebeccah. Smart Textiles for Designers: Inventing the Future of Fabrics. Laurence King Publishing, London, 2016.

Ryan, Susan E. Garments of Paradise: Wearable Discourse in the Digital Age. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2014.

Watkins, Susan M., and Lucy E. Dunne. Functional Clothing Design: From Sportswear to Spacesuits. Fairchild Books, New York, 2015.Here are some things that you may want to put in your syllabus.

Conductive Test

Needs conductive fabric tape around the connections. Make sure that the conductive tape doesn’t touch the resistor on the sewable LED module.

This in a way is a makeshift multimeter - could be used to check if my motors work, for example. Or if a wire is broken. There’s lots of pocket multimeters - can measure resistance and range, where as what we made just checks if a material is conductive for electricity.

There are shiny materials that look like they should conduct but they don’t. Would be fun for TIME Ferrofluid Clock to have a layer of conductive material around the clock that is part of the circuit.

Q: Any fabrics that are magnetic?

Digital vs Analog Input

Digital is on and off. Analog is a range of values.

All conductive materials have resistance. Resistive materials are conductive, but have a very noticeable resistance.

→ Digital Textile Switches

To prevent static electricity, you add a big pull up resistor to ground.

There’s a third mode called internal pull up. INPUT, OUTPUT or INPUT_PULLUP.

Materials

Conductive Fabric

There’s lots of materials, not a lot of colors. Lots of medical applications (EMF shielding & something else).

“ShieldIt Super”: Iron on Adhesive Textile that has one conductive side and one non-conductive.

→ This could have been used on Touch Grass!

Things that conduct electricity also conduct heat, so don’t touch the fabric right after.
Iron onto felt using a pad that acts as an ironing surface.
“ShieldIt Super”

Eeonyx Eeonyx | conductive textiles
Conductive Fabric can be CNC’ed.
Copper Fabric
Woven
Rip stop fabe
(see more in slides)
“Heat N Bond” Ultra hold - available at Michael’s or shop.
Stretchy conductive fabric
There are a lot of fabrics out there with metallic threads in it, some are conductive - others aren’t. bring your tool.

The threads go horizontally so to make the whole

Stainless steel conductive Fiber - #TIME?
Conductive Rubber = Stretch sensor. Can order by the sheet and cut it up. Resistance goes down when stretched.
There’s conductive velcro.

Non-conductive

Felt

Non-freying - saves time, no need to sew on edges.
McMaster Carr has felt strips or
thefeltstore.com The Felt Store US | Shop Online Craft, Wool & Industrial Felt
Cheap craft felt is usually made of acrylic (or natural wool) and so it’s laser cuttable.

Neoprene (usually used by Kobakant)
Hot Glue

Resistive materials

Velostat or Linqstat

You use a specific circuit (check slides, voltage divider?)
Create a relationship between a fixed resistor and a variable resistor.

There are other resistive materials but they’re harder to come by.
Eeonyx (a company): Resistive Rubber & something else.

Stretch Resistant fabric.

PolySense Project - reverse engineering Eeonyx because of IP issue with Cedric Hornet.
Resistive Yarn

🕙

We don’t think of lacing up your shoes or corset as an interaction.

Ohm symbol = resistance which can be measured with the multimeter.

Can be now hooked up to Arduino.

Make 3 switches:

H Bridge

Kate made a really long alligator clip.

Using conductive thread in the sewing machine

Always through the bobbin.

Teach & tell homework

Could Laser cut materials to teach workshop so that people can follow whatever.

E-Textile Swatch Exchange - used to happen as part of camp. It’s archived on their website.

Can explore making a stretch sensor.

Knitting stretch sensor - go downstairs into Knitting Machine?

Zipper switch

Embedding magnets behind conductive fabric

Sew-on Button that were conductive.

Are magnets conductive?

Search was “Metal buttons”.

Magnets for a bracelet connected to a battery and when they’re conductive, they light up.

“Circuits in the 3rd dimmension” with ground on the bottom using conductive thread to connect them to the Z axis.

Or make a tiny Touch Grass!!!

🕙

For tomorrow - can do something with magnets & or ferrofluid?

Q to Kate. Show her the leather.

We’ll be paired up into groups.

Or I can make a controller out of textiles.

Day 2

E-Textile Swatch Exchange

Matrices (like what I did for Touch Grass - it’s a soft circuit).

TacTile by Aranya Khurana

Worked with different rivets

Unstable Design Lab - has new research. Focused on weaving. They have experimental weaving residencies.

“A fabric that remembers”

Developed AdaCAD - hand woven force sensing cloths.

Sentro Knitting Machine - 200$

Intro to Weave Structure for HCI

There was a very nice zine!!

Research | Unstable Design Lab

Kate’s view: Textile Interfaces is at a crossroads - how do we all collaborate.

Q: How do we laser cut conductive materials into fabric?

#THESIS

Social Wearables Design Framework around sensing and actuating.

It’s only recently we’ve started talking about Social Wearables.

Oguz Buruk, Ella Dagan, Katherine Isbister, Elena Marquez Segura, Theresa Jean Tanenbaum Playful Wearables: Understanding the Design Space of Wearables for Games and Related Experiences

Book on Playful Wearables by an ITP Grad.

A separate area is Social Acceptability. Invite people into different types.

You can change how people move and behave

Pair unexpected sensing methods with unexpected outputs. Can share this as publication.

/* Textile Interfaces 2025
  Kate Hartman
  4 analog sensors with values printed to Serial Monitor
  be sure to use a voltage divider circuit for each sensor!
 */

#define DEBOUNCE 100

// Variables that won't change - ANALOG
const int sensorPin1 = A0;
const int sensorPin2 = A1;
const int sensorPin3 = A2;
const int sensorPin4 = A3;

// Variables that won't change - DIGITAL
const int buttonPin12 = 12;

// Variables that will change - ANALOG
int sensorValue1 = 1;
int sensorValue2 = 1;
int sensorValue3 = 1;
int sensorValue4 = 1;

// Variables that will change - DIGITAL
int buttonValue12 = 1;


void setup() {
  // Initialize button's input
  pinMode(buttonPin12, INPUT_PULLUP);

  // initialize serial
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {

  // read all sensor pins
  sensorValue1 = analogRead(sensorPin1);
  sensorValue2 = analogRead(sensorPin2);
  sensorValue3 = analogRead(sensorPin3);
  sensorValue4 = analogRead(sensorPin4);

  buttonValue12 = digitalRead(buttonPin12);

  // Serial.print("Val 1: ");
  // Serial.print(sensorValue1);
  Serial.println(", Val 2: ");
  Serial.print(sensorValue2);
  Serial.print(", Val 3: ");
  Serial.print(sensorValue3);
  Serial.print(", Val 4: ");
  Serial.print(sensorValue4);
  Serial.print("Val 12:");
  Serial.print(buttonValue12);

  delay(DEBOUNCE); // delay in between reads for stability
}

Bespoke Textile Interfaces

Kate can show us how to make key presses - send us test code.

Goal: Demo a new design; new technical approach; new tilt sensor; choice of sensors; digital or analog.

Deliverable around Textile Interfaces.

Projects around magnets and ferrofluids

Leather with Magnets
Could have a bunch of spiky buttons that when touched activate magnet and circuit is underneath. And ferrofluid moves accordingly?
Different ways to use magnets as stitches.

Circuit in finger gloves

Orrrr sew on a conductive thread in between leather layer that changes shape of magnetic field.

one with 3 magnets one with 3, 2, 1, one with conductive thread.

Touch Grass

Weaving LEDs into Cloth to make matrices.

Thermo pigments

Weave LEDs into the textile

LED nets

Or LED strips - with maybe some fixed tubing that diffuses light but is still woven to make it seem like these are waves for Touch Grass.

Thermochromic pigment - weave across sections of resistive thread. Activate them in different combination.

Concordia - Studio Subtella - old weaving lab. PhD students

Barbara Lane used to work there.

Joana Prozouski’s work - thermacronic projects.

Homework - do!

Textile Interfaces