Computation and new materials are entering the world of textiles, challenging our view on the textile material. As new techniques and electrically conductive fibres enable the design of textile circuits and computationally active textiles [2], the areas of smart textile design and interaction design start to merge. Wearable computing [cf.1], the notion of moving computational tools directly onto the body, might have been the first approach to bring computation technology closer to the area of clothing.. In an approach to investigate new enhanced forms of expressional interaction through textiles, the relationship between tactile and visual aesthetical properties are explored in the present paper. Textile Dimensions, an interactive set of textiles, shows how clothes and textiles become interfaces themselves, able to sense and react on external stimuli in expressive ways.
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Smart textiles