Project synopsis
We are making a themed children’s fabric book with soft sensors to create an interactive playful experience.
By adding digital interactive elements to the fabric book, we hope to explore innovative ways of letting young children to learn and practice skills through tactile experiences with the help of soft electronics.
The fabric book will be made from materials like felt(or/and other types of traditional fabric), yarn, conductive fabric and conductive yarn, and sensors like capacitive touch, pressure and sensor to trigger events. The events triggered by interacting with these sensors could be lighting up LEDs,sounds, small vibrations, shapes changes in fabric, and etc…
Proof-of-concept experiment
[Illustration: the interaction will be like: putting an element to connect the circuit for LED to light up/pressing part of the book for sound/rubbing part of the book to trigger vibration]
For the proof of concept experiment we will be building prototypes with different soft sensors and interactions and doing testings to find the most suitable ones. We will start with making one page from the fabric book and integrate the interaction with the fabric material for the book’s base. The page we are making for the proof of concept is like a sample ‘book’ of possible interactions.
The questions we are trying to answer here are:
- How to translate tactile interactions into digital inputs?
- How to integrate digital outputs into soft fabric materials while maintaining the softness?
Related art or design projects
Traditional children’s fabric books
Papers and resources
- I. Posch, “Crafting Stories: Smart and Electronic Textile Craftsmanship for Interactive Books,” in Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, New York, NY, USA, Feb. 2021, pp. 1–12, doi: 10.1145/3430524.3446076.
- KOBAKANT DIY WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY DOCUMENTATION. Url: https://www.kobakant.at/DIY/
- J. Qi and L. Buechley, “Electronic popables: exploring paper-based computing through an interactive pop-up book,” in Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction, New York, NY, USA, Jan. 2010, pp. 121–128, doi: 10.1145/1709886.1709909.