3rd PLATE Conference
September 18 – 20, 2019
Berlin, Germany
Nils F. Nissen
Melanie Jaeger-Erben (eds.)
Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin
Greinke, Berit; Sametinger, Florian; Baker, Camille; Bryan-Kinns, Nick; Her-
nandez, Lucie; Ranaivoson, Heritiana: Social sustainability approaches in
electronic textiles crafts communities . In: Nissen, Nils F.; Jaeger-Erben,
Melanie (Eds.): PLATE – Product Lifetimes And The Environment : Proceed-
ings, 3rd PLATE CONFERENCE, BERLIN, GERMANY, 18 – 20 September
2019. Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2021. pp. 301 – 307. ISBN
978-3-7983-3125-9 (online). https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-9253.
This article – except for quotes, fi gures and where otherwise noted – is
licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0).
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Social Sustainability Approaches in Electronic Textiles Crafts
Communities
Greinke, Berit(a); Sametinger, Florian(a); Baker, Camille(b); Bryan-Kinns, Nick(c); Hernandez,
Lucie(d); Ranaivoson, Heritiana(e)
a) Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany
b) University for the Creative Arts, Epsom, United Kingdom
c) Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom
d) Falmouth University, Penryn, UK
e) imec-SMIT-VUB, Brussels, Belgium
Keywords: Social Sustainability; Digital Crafts; Electronic Textiles; Wearables.
Abstract: This paper reports on results from the EU H2020 WEAR project, which between 2017-2019
has facilitated sustainable innovation processes in the field of smart textiles and wearable technology.
46 design-technology interdisciplinary projects and start-ups throughout Europe were selected
through two Open Calls, and funded to develop creative solutions for a broad range of sustainability
challenges within the relevant industries.
The paper outlines collaboration between two WEAR teams (KOBA, Touch Craft) as makers and
facilitators and their audiences through crafts and practical making of electronic textiles artefacts. In
particular, it reports how engagement with communities (as customers and/or co-creators) was used
to increase social cohesion and well-being as social sustainability potential. Findings highlight the
importance of quality of interaction, in particular, ongoing, in-person exchange, either between crafter
and customer (KOBA) or facilitator and crafts community groups (Touch Craft). It further emerged that
social cohesion could contribute to finding solutions to environmental and economic challenges,
through encouraging local production, made-to-order production and local business development.
Introduction
Designers and artists are challenging the
processes by which smart textiles and wearable
technology are currently designed,
manufactured and used. Following two decades
of technology-centred research and
development, bringing advancements in
sensing and data processing capabilities,
miniaturisation, efficiency and accuracy,
wearables and smart textiles are now entering
the market, and a growing concern about
environmental and social impacts becomes a
focus in public debate. Addressing some of
these challenges, the project WEAR (Wearable
technologists Engage with Artists for
Responsible innovation), funded through the
EU H2020 ICT-36-2016 programme, has
between 2017 - 2019 facilitated sustainable
innovation processes in the field of smart
textiles and wearable technology. 46 design-
technology interdisciplinary projects and start-
ups were supported through a cascaded
funding scheme, to develop creative solutions
to environmental, social and economical
sustainability challenges. Successful applicants
were supported over six months with research
and development budget, a bespoke mentoring
support package and marketing activities.
Alongside the support for individual projects,
WEAR developed an enabling framework, by
bringing together industrial companies, SMEs,
start-ups, actors of electronic textiles and
wearable tech communities, designers,
makers, local organisations and potential
customers - leading to raising awareness and
cross-sector open innovation for more
sustainable processes in the relevant
industries.
While results of the overall project and its
outcomes (among them a Sustainability
Strategy Toolkit) are addressed elsewhere
(Baker et al., 2018; Bryan-Kinns et al., 2018),
this paper reflects on socially sustainable
practice explored through crafts and critical
making, as addressed by two funded projects:
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Greinke B., Sametinger F., Baker C., Bryan-Kinns N., Hernandez L.,
Ranaivoson H.
Social sustainability approaches in electronic textiles crafts communities
1. KOBA - a tailor shop for electronic textiles
and wearable technologies in Berlin /
Germany;
2. Touch Craft - a social enterprise for local
community engagement and economic
development in Penryn, Cornwall / UK.
Background
There is a strong interest and tradition in
socially enriching practice through crafts in both
academic and making communities related to
electronic textiles (e-textiles), bringing together
traditions of critical textile crafts (as practised in
several impactful design and crafts schools,
e.g. Bauhaus or Arts and Crafts movement),
with the more recent development of Open
Source and Open Hardware advocated in
global maker communities.
Different concepts of crafts involving electronic
textiles are reported in the open literature.
Kettley (2010) describes crafts as a form of
critical engagement, enriching crafters (and
other beneficiaries) by producing “tangible
computational products that seek to be
metaphorically meaningful as well as useful”.
Others promote crafts cultures and individual
practices from specific regions, to provide
meaning and new business opportunities for
local communities (e.g. Tharakan, 2011). Others
again utilise crafts as a means to advance
engineering research, and develop innovative
prototypes (e.g. Waldhör et al., 2017), while a
fourth area of interest focuses on poetic
storytelling and making use of crafts to create
artistic artefacts (e.g. Sandra de Berducci
1
;
Kurbak, 2018). Based on this distinction, we
propose to classify the role of crafts in
contemporary e-textile practice as follows:
1.
Application-based development for product
innovation: Crafts in this category can be
understood as a handmade precursor of an
industrially manufactured product. Crafters
regularly use ready-made prototyping
platforms (e.g. Arduino), however in the view
of optimising the later product with regard to
specific and robust functionality, energy
consumption, washability and comfort.
2.
Crafts as meaningful making: This category
is interested in using crafts as an educational
and storytelling method, to engage specific
1 https://www.sandradeberduccy.com
communities and facilitate social enrichment.
E-textiles are not produced with
commercialisation in mind, but aim to enable
inclusiveness and participation in technology
development or within specific disengaged or
disadvantaged groups or individuals.
3.
Artistic use of e-textiles for performance and
conceptual fashion: This category of makers
is mostly concerned with the expression of
hypothetical concepts and critical aesthetics.
Works in this category are less interested in
reproducibility, or technical advancement as
such, but focus on exploring underlying
larger topics such as “sense reframing”
(Schwartzman, 2011), body and
consciousness, or artificial intelligence.
Social sustainability in e-textile
crafts communities
The second and third categories outlined above
can be tied to the current discussion on social
sustainability in relation to design and craft (e.g.
see Mazé, Gregory, & Redström, 2011;
McMahon & Bhamra, 2015; Woodcraft,
Hackett, & Caistor-Arendar, 2011), which forms
an important ingredient in the contextualisation
and setting of e-textile craft. Social
sustainability is often addressed relating to two
different goals2:
1. Social cohesion: increasing participation in
social activities by individuals; helping to
develop a sense of belonging; building links
within the broader community; encouraging
to contribute towards the community or
provide support for others.
2. Quality of Life: increasing mental health
outcomes; supporting education, training
and skill development; providing access to
community amenities and facilities.
To illustrate how these have been addressed
by WEAR teams, we introduce two examples
of supported projects in the next section.
WEAR Projects
Project 1: KOBA
KOBA defines itself as an “electronic textile
tailor shop where anybody can place an order
2 e.g WACOSS Social Sustainability Assessment
Framework http://integral-sustainability.net/wp-
content/uploads/sas4-2-hodgson.pdf
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for custom-made wearable technology
garments and accessories”. It was run by artist
collective KOBAKANT from January 2018 until
February 2019, consisting of media artists and
designers Hannah Perner-Wilson and Mika
Satomi. The duo is widely known in the e-textile
design community for the online knowledge
platform “How to get what you want”3, through
which they freely publish materials resources,
processes and codes.
Their focus is on textile and electronic Do-It-
Yourself (DIY) practice. Commercial product
development is not stated as a concern.
Instead, they describe the KOBA shop as an
artistic and public experiment, and “a story we
are telling”4. While the audience around their
previous work were mostly like-minded makers,
designers, crafters and artists, the intention of
the shop was to reach out to the general public
and allow curious members of the public to
discover the possibilities of e-textiles and
wearables, and reassess the current production
and use patterns of technology.
Original goals of KOBA proposal
KOBAKANT describes their original intention
as creating “an electronic textile tailor shop
where anybody can place an order for custom-
made wearable technology garments and
accessories.” The proposal addressed social
sustainability goals as follows:
Accessible/Democratic/Diverse: Services to
the general public, and keeping cost low to
invite diverse customers;
Maintaining Diversity: What, how and for
who is technology made;
Made-to-order service: May increase
personal investment by customers, thereby
more meaningful products;
Transparency: Make processes and labour
behind production visible;
Data/Privacy: Developing non-exploitative
technology solutions;
Open Design: All works published as open-
source hardware;
Education: Customers will be instructed to
be able to repair, recycle, and reuse parts of
their products.
3 https://www.kobakant.at/DIY/
4 https://www.kobakant.at/KOBA/concept-revisited/
Reflecting on Activities
Upon setting up and opening KOBA after a
preparation period of four months, KOBA
curated a full programme of activities to run in
parallel with the day-to-day business of the
shop. These included:
Commissions
Shoptalks
Exhibitions
Commissioning essays / texts by mentors
Ongoing critical reviewing of their shop
concept
At the end of the six-month WEAR funding
period, KOBA had established itself as a
critical project and a place for outreach and
community
engagement. Audiences included the
international e-textile community, and new
members from adjacent local artists and
technological fields. 14 commissions were
completed, and several series of public events
and exhibitions were curated and frequented
by between 10 and 100 visitors per event.
Reflecting on their original intention of inviting
the general public to the shop, the team felt
KOBA had less of an impact in the
neighbourhood than hoped. This was mainly
due to the limited time the shop existed. They
also noted that people already working in
creative or digital industries were “feeling
much more comfortable to come in”. The high
quality of interaction with customers however
was pointed out as a positive outcome, rating
the possibility of meeting in person highly in
terms of importance. A strong common
interest either in e-textiles or the shop itself
was also identified as a beneficial starting
point for customer relations. This quality of
interaction extended into the commissions and
the produced garments themselves, as they
allowed both KOBAKANT and customers to
get to know each other, learn and exchange
personal stories, and in some cases “to
become friends”. This also had an impact on
the produced garments themselves, which
became meaningful to the wearer through
sharing of stories with the KOBA team.
According to Satomi, the environmental
aspects of the work could not be assessed
directly due to the lack of clear guidelines. The
made-to-order process indicates however that
tailored garments with embedded technology
may require a slow production comparable to
conventional tailored items, resulting in more
meaningful products that need fewer
replacements, and encourage care and repair.
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Additional events around the commissions
further contributed to social cohesion between
the various audiences. A final exhibition and
event provided the opportunity to showcase
KOBA’s process and results in multiple
formats; from written stories to live-performed
ones, the produced garments, verbal
presentations, as well as the exhibition of the
KOBA shop as such, including work-in-
progress prototypes, textile and electronic
samples, tools, sketches and models (see Fig.
1 and 2).
Figure 1 and 2. KOBA shop, final exhibition and
performances.
Team 2: Touch Craft
Touch Craft defines itself as “a not-for-profit
organisation that explores methods of
embedding stories into textiles as a way to
engage different audiences and contribute
towards social cohesion and wellbeing.” The
project was co-founded by textile and
interaction design researcher Lucie
Hernandez, and developer Edwin Love. The
team uses e-textiles to design innovative soft
technology products together with local
crafters, and facilitate workshops, encouraging
participants to utilise the multi-sensory
capabilities of e-textiles (visual, tactile) and
electronics (sound, visual, tactile) for
storytelling. Their approach is grounded in co-
creation and participatory design5 (Hernandez,
2017).
Original goals of Touch Craft proposal
Touch Crafts’ proposal responded to the
Social and Workplace Ethics theme set by
WEAR as follows:
Active involvement of people: Embedding
technology in communities’ interests through
crafts
Advocacy: Advocate for community
requirements and personalise functionality
Business models: Create security and future
resilience for the groups activities through
reinvestment from profits
They further responded to the ‘Environmental
Sourcing and Life-cycle theme’, providing clear
links to the aforementioned social
sustainability goals. These included:
Circular design: Community determines best
practices for reuse and repair
Design for attachment: Develop a
relationship with products, reducing
replacement
Maintenance training: Actively involving
beneficiaries in repair activities.
Reflecting Activities
Touch Craft initiated two strands of work
during the six-month WEAR funding period.
One part aimed towards prototyping
commercial e-textile interior products. The
second was a series of community workshops
(see Fig. 3 and 4), which however also
explored the concept of market value of “team-
initiated” e-textile products. Small batches of
the two prototypes Story Blanket and Sensory
Cushions (see Fig. 4 and 5) were fabricated
and tested.
The value of community crafting for health and
well-being of the participants emerged as the
main benefit of the project. Hernandez
observed that multi-sensory engagement with
the crafted object “enabled people to engage
on a deep level” and express and
communicate personal stories through
materials and local nature-related themes.
Hernandez mentions that e-textiles have not
yet been around long enough to assess if
crafted objects can embody similar meaning to
people as traditionally crafted artefacts do,
however points out that the process was
5 see Sanders & Stappers, 2008
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similar: using personal storytelling, defining a
purpose and the addressee of the object.
Participants reflected positively on
collaboration, multi-sensory materials and
meaning to personal memory. One participant
describes their experience on collaboration as,
“I was interested in the combination of sound
and touch and feel, so the whole kind of
concept behind the project”. Another
participant reflects, “I love working like this,
and especially working with these embroidery
silks, it takes me right back, granny showing
me how to split the threads.”
Figure 3. and 4. Touch Craft workshop and
examples of work from workshop.
Figure 5. Touch Craft product development.
Identifying the communities both as
“participants and producers”, Touch Craft sees
the benefits on “small-scale processes, slow,
local production”, ”nurturing an emphasis on
slowness, valuing present time, re-skilling
through shared knowledge, learning and co-
creation”. They frame this as “durable
practices” (see also Chapman, 2009) and
observed that “through the act of cooperating
and participating directly, people increase in
confidence and develop their creativity and
imagination.” The aim is to encourage also
business activities by producing and selling
team-initiated e-textile products. By the end of
the WEAR funding period, the prototypes were
tested by the participants in their homes.
Discussion
The work undertaken by the teams above
highlights that social sustainability aspects of
knowledge transparency, open sharing, free
education (or at least included in a service) are
important to the e-textile communities who
originated from a crafts background.
Furthermore, these are linked to other
sustainability goals through local production,
made-to-measure and local business
development.
Although KOBA was not intended as a for-
profit business, by critically reviewing business
practices it may inform how small-scale crafts
businesses could use new ways of engaging
with local specialist communities to create
niche markets for profit. It additionally
highlighted how merging different modes of
operation could lead to innovative
online/offline crafts and technology businesses
models.
Touch Craft’s clear goals and reflective rigour
have helped in evaluating co-creation values
resulting from a participatory design process.
They point out the requirement for continuous
exchange between communities and
facilitators, however are not yet sufficiently
progressed in their development to evaluate if
sustainable business will be possible. This,
however, highlights the shortcomings of
funding schemes like WEAR, which only
provide limited support for short periods of
time. A more sustainable “slow business”
approach may be needed, including the
access to follow-on funding.
Both teams described how the quality of
interaction between themselves and their
customers/participants brought a benefit to
their projects, which could in retrospect be
described as a process of increasing social
cohesion in their respective communities. For
KOBA this was especially relevant for their
commission work, during which the customer
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and the artists shared the stories related to the
commission (why the customer wanted it and
what functional and poetic value it would
carry), artistic objective (KOBA bespoke
technology: what do people want), social
sustainability requirements (e.g. open sharing
of plans, transparency of making) and
technical plans. KOBA challenges current
business models prevalent in the electronics
industries by allocating significant time and
resources for one-off and bespoke
commissions, allowing them to build e-textile
wearables meaningful to their customers, and
publishing detailed information about the
process online - all this while operating out a
physical, high-street store. The team however
repeatedly stated that they had to start with
unrealistically low prices to draw in customers,
and their “real income” was earned through
parallel teaching activities.
The participatory design approach used by
Touch Craft allowed them to adjust the goals
of their work. Improving quality of life of the
workshop participants emerged as a benefit,
however the team mentions that the strict
timeline of the WEAR funded period was not
beneficial for the exploration of slowness as an
approach, and further funding will be required.
Reviewing the classification of using crafts in
e-textiles, it becomes clear that both teams
utilised a combination of these, with an
emphasis on Crafts as meaningful making.
While in the short period of receiving funding
through the WEAR scheme it was not possible
to explore all aspects of sustainability, benefits
emerged from increasing quality of
participation, providing education and skill
development and transparency of processes
and in exchange.
Summary
This paper reported of social sustainability
approaches of two teams funded through the
WEAR scheme. They addressed social
cohesion and quality of life challenges, which
are two distinct principles of social
sustainability6.
KOBA utilised a combination of outreach,
community engagement and communications
to build links between known and new
individuals. For KOBA the open sharing of
6 these principles can be found in various Sustainable
Development Goals (e.g. SDG 3, 4, 9)
information related to their processes was key,
and the WEAR funding was used to test this
within an experimental, yet traditional-style
tailor shop scenario. By freely publishing all
information related to commission, they also
contribute to education, training and skill
development for individuals who previously
have not had participated in e-textile practice.
It was however noted that maintaining a for-
profit a shop as livelihood would not be
possible due to high costs and current low
demand.
Touch Craft used an iterative process of
engagement with local crafts communities,
increasing both social cohesion and quality of
life for participants. Continuous exchange over
longer periods of time was rated as highly
important, allowing the community to build
trust and confidence. Touch Craft has taken
the first steps towards setting up a social
enterprise, using e-textiles and crafts activities
to both engage and enrich communities, and
(at a later
stage) generate income from group-initiated e-
textile products.
One way to strengthen crafts-based
enterprises, combining co-creation,
educational and commission work may be
through schemes like WEAR, to support local
activities while also facilitating sufficient
exchange and outreach through a European-
wide network of crafts communities, customers
and makers online. However it is clear that
support over a longer time would be required
to turn socially sustainable and crafts-based
enterprises in the area of e-textiles and
wearables into self-maintaining businesses.
There is a need for more crafts/technology-
business development schemes, which allows
the crafter to test and implement “slow
business” approaches, bringing together
traditional crafts development with online and
offline outreach and knowledge sharing
activities that lead to sustainable community
development.
Acknowledgments
The work has been funded European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under grant agreement No.
732098.
We thank KOBA and Touch Craft for providing
research materials and photographs for
publication.
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