Crafting Smart Textiles – a meaningful way towards societal sustainability in the fashion field?

Abstract

Smart textiles with its vast range of possibilities provide a considerable opportunity\nfor societal sustainability for the waste-oriented fashion industry. May the new textiles\nreact to the environment, wearer, have a mind of its own or simply provoke and inspire\npeople – it is a great tool for the transition from the product-oriented industry to the\nservice-minded economy. Fashion field needs to mature and adapt to the new rules\nset by the user within today’s environment. While developing the new field of smart\ntextiles, this paper stresses the importance of learning from traditional crafts and the\nvalue of craftsmanship.\nWe start by introducing the importance of crafting and connecting it to the industrialized\nway of producing. Then, we ask whether we could merge valuable insights from\nboth in order to develop the smart textiles area. Later, you will find an example project\nmerging Quick Response (QR) codes with traditional embroidery that inspired a set of\nTechCrafts explorations in a form of student projects. In case of the embroidered QR\ncodes, the link to technology is an add-on feature to textiles. In the other examples,\ncraftsmanship technologies are used to create the textile substrate itself. These\nexplorations are the input for a discussion about the role of craftsmanship and skills in\ndeveloping materials with interactive properties that is held with relation to the possibilities\nfor societal sustainability.

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