E-Textiles, Smart Textiles, Flexible Hybrid Electronics: Who’s Saying What?
Recently, LOOMIA and the Unstable Design Lab jointly ran a survey that asked people working in e-textiles (or more broadly, “electronics + textiles”) how they liked to talk about their work. The Unstable Design Lab is a design and human-computer interaction lab at the University of Colorado Boulder that researches e-textiles. True to the lab’s name, there’s been some debate between members about how to label their work. LOOMIA has posted about the differences and overlaps between terms like “e-textiles”, “smart textiles”, and “functional fabrics” previously, but we wanted to test some theories about how people are actually using these terms.
Hypothesis: We suspect that non-textile engineers will prefer the terms the involve the word “circuit” or “electronics”, and dislike words involving “textile”.
The survey asked people to think about the following terms:
E-textiles
Smart textiles
Functional fabrics
Soft circuits
Flexible circuits/devices
FHE (Flexible Hybrid Electronics)
Stretchable electronics
Participants were asked which terms they had heard of, if they preferred or disliked any on the list, and if they saw any differences between the terms. They could also add any terms that we had missed. We received a wide variety of responses, representing a range of age, genders, nationalities, experience levels, and professional backgrounds!
Demographics
Total Participants - 63
0 years of e-textile experience - 21
1+ years of e-Textile experience - 42
Gender: Female (28), Male (33), Non-Binary (2)
Age - 18 to 75
Occupation - Homemaker to CEO
The terms “e-textiles” and “flexible hybrid electronics” seemed to stand at two extremes of a language spectrum.
Findings
Did Not Like:
30/63 did not like Stretchable Electronics
26/63 did not like Soft Circuits
31/63 did not like Flexible Hybrid Electronics
17/63 did not like Flexible Circuits and Devices
14/63 did not like Functional Fabrics
17/63 did not like Smart Textiles
5/63 did not like E-Textiles
Because we also collected demographic information on participants’ career paths and asked them to categorize their own work, we wanted to see if there were any differences between the disciplines represented in our field. The main categories were “engineer”, “creative technologist”, or “artist/crafts person”, but participants also added “venture capital”, “HR”, “textile designer”, and other roles.
What Engineers Liked
7/19 liked E-textiles/Smart Textiles
3/19 liked Flexible Hybrid Electronics
2/19 liked Soft Circuits
What Creative Technologists Liked
18/20 liked E-Textiles
10/20 liked Smart Textiles
7/20 liked Soft Circuits
5/20 liked Functional Fabrics
2/20 liked Flexible Hybrid Electronics
What Other Careers Liked
8/24 liked Smart Textiles
7/24 liked E-Textiles
2/24 liked Stretchable Electronics
1/24 liked Soft Circuits
Digging deeper into our data, many participants generously gave time to answer some free-response questions on their language associations with “e-textiles” or “flexible hybrid electronics”. By and large, people were concerned about future e-textiles/flexible device products being washable, both as an essential criteria for usability and as a technical challenge to overcome with new materials.
We also see some interesting disagreements about how much the “e-textiles / smart fabrics” label overlapped with the “flexible / wearable” label. While most people said that they’re either related or even nested categories, a minority of respondents associated the two with different materials or fabrication techniques. A key quote from a dissenting opinion
“Fabrics are made of fibers that can easily be manipulated whereas flexible and wearable devices are made of plastics or hard materials.”
which points out that many of our current wearable devices like smartwatches don’t use fabrics (or if they do, there aren’t integrated electronics in the fabric).
Returning to our initial hypothesis, it seems that our hunch was wrong about engineers preferring terms with “circuits” or “electronics” over terms that focused on “textiles”! But the data shows a much more nuanced picture of how people are thinking about the future of e-textile technologies. We see folks grappling with using language that is specific and descriptive (e.g. “electronics” implies semiconductor devices and the associated materials and processes, while “textiles” implies yarns/fiber and knitting/weaving/felting/etc.) versus language that is general and accessible. Broad terms like “e-textiles” and putting the “smart” label before a product category are easily understood by a general audience, but for those working within the industry, these terms can become “buzzwords” which are vague and unhelpful for describing the technical details of their work.
We presented these initial findings and analyses in a webinar, hosting a town-hall-style discussion with interested survey respondents. Again, there was a diverse range of experiences in the virtual room. Speaking face to face, we wanted to get the room thinking about their language use when talking to others in e-textiles. Since the survey focused on people’s language use within their own professional contexts, we were especially interested in any experiences that people had collaborating across disciplines when working in e-textiles. From one participant on the differences in working with textile engineers vs. electrical engineers:
“Textile engineers tend to have a broader perspective as they can see concrete applications (wearables / clothing ). Whereas [electrical engineers] may be a little more broad technically: e.g. use of flexible circuits in detection stretching.”
While our data set is by no means comprehensive, these survey results were a fascinating exploratory poke into the interdisciplinary nature of the emerging e-textiles field and the future of the industry. We hope that sharing these findings will help us communicate effectively across professions and consider different perspectives when discussing soft, flexible, and textile based circuits of all shapes and sizes.
We’d like to shout out the following people for their contributions and thoughtful responses:
Ricardo O'Nascimento
Andrea C
Robert Tietze
Vicente Jorge Sanchis Rico
J.J.M Geurts
Michelle Farrington
Jim Stathis
Lina Stephens
Radoslav Hanic
Charlie Lindahl
Amy Jenkins
Darryl
Md Mehdi Hasan
Qianwen Yu
Lori Ann Wahl
Michael Stewart
@cooolrunnings
Pranav Sai
James Ochieng
Eddie Yam (Intertek HK)
Gil M
Muhammed Tawhidur Rahman
Bobby Bedi
About the Researchers
If you’d like to learn more about the Unstable Design Lab’s side of this collaboration, please visit the lab website unstable.design, where you can see other projects happening in the group. You can also directly reach out to the PhD student leading this particular project on studying e-textiles design practices, Shanel Wu.
Writing by Shanel Wu
Images by Mary Vogt