Exploring Computational Materials as Fashion Materials: Recommendations for Designing Fashionable Wearables

Çağlar Genç, Oğuz Turan Buruk, Sejda İnal, Kemal Can, Oğuzhan Özcan

Fashion is becoming an inevitable part of the wearable devices. Yet, it is not clear how the cross-pollination between computational and fashion materials might suggest directions for wearables. We believe exploring this territory is important for providing actionable directions to the designers and engineers. Therefore, we followed a two-pillared research through design method: (1) a design workshop with 14 fashion design and 6 engineering students where they created 7 artifacts by exploring computational and fashion materials and (2) semi-structured interviews with 10 wearable design experts from different countries, in which discussed our analysis on the workshop outcomes. After we refined our findings with the feedbacks of the experts we came up with 5 design recommendations for designers along with the strategies that they can follow for applying them. This kind of recommendations, achieved through an examinations that bridges fashion design and computational materials by also considering expert opinions, was not implemented before. In this respect, our recommendations are shaped up as follows: (1) Giving information through fabric augmentation, (2) defining bi-directional interaction between the contexts and garments, (3) controlling the form of the garments, (4) treating surfaces, and (5) supporting the three dimensional shape of the garment with computational materials.