The Textility of Emotion: A Study Relating Computational Textile Textural Expression to Emotion

Abstract

Computational textiles are textiles that respond to computer programming commands through embedded electronics. The purpose of this study is to determine what still and shape-changing, textural expressions of computational textiles can communicate emotionally to people. The central hypothesis is that for both kinds of textiles, there will be differences depending on whether the study participants experience the textiles via vision alone or via both vision and touch. If designers could begin to understand the nature of what various textile expressions communicated, and what computational textiles communicated in transformation then it would be possible to more clearly understand the role that texture of a computational textile plays in communicating emotion through a computational object.