With Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological view that human beings ‘take in’ the world and experience themselves as subjects through their bodies as a starting point, players in both men’s and women’s teams, kit men, purchasing managers, sporting directors, and a coach from Swedish football clubs have been interviewed about their perceptions and experiences of football clothing. Since the body is both a feeling and knowing entity, clothes are seen as components of body techniques, facilitating or restricting body movements in a material way, but also as creators of senses, like lightness and security; in both ways, influencing the knowledge in action that playing football is. In this article, the content of the interviews is discussed in relation to health. When clothes are primarily related to a biomedical view that health means no injuries and illnesses, warm pants and shin guards are mentioned by players, who are rather ambivalent to both, since these garments counteract a feeling of lightness that is connected to the perception of speed. Players want to be fast rather than well protected. If clothes, instead, are interpreted as related to a broad conception of health, including mental, social, and physical components, the relation body–space-in-between–clothes seems to be an important aspect of clothing. Dressed in a sports uniform, unable to choose individual details, the feeling of subjectivity is related to wearing ‘the right-size’ clothes. Also new textile technology, like injury-preventing and speed-increasing tight compression underwear, is perceived by players based on feelings that they are human subjects striving for both bodily and psychological well-being.
Om ull och ullhandel 1800-tal
According to anthropological research it is fundamental that aspects of conceptuality and materiality are tied together in handicraft products. Objects have a social history and a cultural biography as well as a material form (Appadurai 1996). Thus analyzing crafting knowledge must involve both looking for bodily competences performed in the meeting with the materials (hand operations, touch, rhythm etc) and mapping cultural meanings on craft. In the ongoing project “Design, craft and culture” this is done through visual/sensory ethnography. Participant observations with video-filming and interviewing are done at Vävkompaniet, a cooperative running handicraft shop, and Design Brenner, private family company for tufting. This paper brings up cultural meanings on craft, expressed by the craft practitioners themselves. What producers in both companies tell about work practices, inspiration, how they relate to the textile tradition etc. is discussed. Their definitions of the concepts craft, art craft, sloyd and design are especially highlighted. This is important since debate regarding craft as material expression versus craft as conceptual art implies different focuses when it comes to what counts as important knowledge - skill in using the proper raw material and technique to make useful products, or skill to materialize ideas in creative ways?
This report gives an overview of projects combining smart textiles and clothing as a basis for discussions of how smart textiles could be introduced to in fashion. The overview covers different projects, research as well as commercial projects within smart textiles and clothing, with a certain focus on European activities.
The expressiveness of use is of focal interest in fashion design, which makes the perspective of act design important in learning/teaching. The objective of the project presented here was to introduce interaction design methods in fashion design teaching to make act design explicit throughout the different stages of the design process in a systematic manner; to develop a general workshop curriculum in experimental fashion design focusing on the expressiveness of wearing and use. A series of test workshops were implemented to provide a foundation for reflection and critical discussions. The main results, motivated by workshop evaluations, consist of theoretical models for a systematic development of workshop exercises in fashion design aesthetics.
In this paper we describe a set of sound sensitive structures based on piezoelectric technique. We have laminated piezoelectric polymer films between layers of different textile fabric structures. The initial results show that these structures register sound and the signal quality depends on the laminate set-up. Textile sound structures offer a variety of possible applications such as active sound absorbers and heart rate monitoring.
This work deals with Smart Textiles in interaction with the body. We design textiles and outfits as tools that can influence fashion and textile design. Central to our work is that artistic envisioning can point to new possibilities and values, in which we want to stress the importance of combining traditional materials and methods with contemporary and future functions in order to obtain sustainable ideas. The film documents a performance, where dancers create a link between the body, the textile material and the room surrounding the body. The textile material and the garment are to inspire movement that, in turn, creates development; when a person wears the garment and moves in a certain way or touches other persons, the visual expression of the room changes through an electronic signal. In this case, the colour of the pattern of the textile draping changes to the static pattern that is printed on the person’s outfit. The point of the show was to show possibilities of non-static and dynamic design through scenic expression.
In this project we create a link between body, textile material and space. Textiles and garments shall inspire to motion that generates variability. When a body moves through a space, touches other bodies and parts of its garment, it affects the visual expression in the room. More specifically the background changes and adapts partially to the pattern of the garments. The base for our investigation is to perform artistic work with the expression of set design in the centre, that shows the possibilities, matters and values of fashion and textile design beyond the traditional boundaries. The tapestry is weawed in cotton, steel and wool. Print in heat sensitive pigment (supplier Variotherm Zenit Konsthantverk AB). The dresses are knitted in cotton and silverthreads. Acknowledgements: The burn-out experiments were made at IFP Research in Borås. The knitted samples and the tablecloth were made together with Tommy Martinsson and Folke Sandvik at the knitting department at the Swedish School of Textiles, University College of Borås.
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.
This article builds on the current rethinking of nostalgia in heritage studies and an increasing amount of research that explores the formatting of customer – producer relationships in terms of ’market attachments’ to analyse how nostalgia is performative on the market for retro, vintage and second hand, what we call the re:heritage market. Based on a multi-sited study including offline and online ethnographic observations, photography and qualitative interviews with shop owners and staff at a selection of central streets in Gothenburg, Sweden, the article explores the way shop owners work with nostalgia in order to attract, or ‘captate’, the public, through engaging affective market devices. Our particular contribution is to show how the re:heritage market contribute to our understanding of an alternative of cultural heritage, through configuring exchange and value, and details how ‘affective captation’ adds conceptual strength for understanding the emotive and sensate pull of certain market-based heritage practices. Staging nostalgic encounters involves practices of selecting, collecting, displaying and preserving for the future: practices that are vital for all heritage-making. A variety of actors are involved in this unconventional of heritage at safe a distance from traditional heritage practices.
Vi påverkas alla av mode; mest uppenbart som konsumenter, men till exempel också genom näringens betydelse för den nationella ekonomin; genom modereklamens framträdande plats i städernas offentliga miljöer eller när vi tar del av samhällsdebatt om textilproduktion och ekologi. Mode är ett fenomen med bäring på stora delar av samhället och som griper in i våra liv, och därmed ett område väl lämpat för flervetenskaplig forskning. I denna rapport ger professor Björn Brorström och fil. dr. Johan Sundeen en första presentation av forskningsprogrammet M3 – mode, miljö och marknad. De pekar på möjligheten av en FoU-driven utveckling – med samproduktion mellan Högskolan i Borås och det omgivande samhället som en bärande del – som skulle stärka Sjuhäradsregionens ställning som textilt centrum.
Consuming less but better or the best – this would be a sign of wisdom. The wisdom of resilience, which tells us, that at the end of a story there is always the beginning of a story, but a better story...