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Smart garment and wearable e-textile prototypes are difficult to co-design because of the variety of expertise needed (garment design, sewing skills, hardware prototyping, and software programming). To help with this, we developed a toolkit for prototyping wearable etextiles, named Wearable Bits, which enables co-design with non-expert users without demanding sewing, hardware or software skills. We developed a low-fidelity and medium-fidelity experience prototype of the toolkit and ran a series of workshops where non-expert users designed their own e-textile wearables using Wearable Bits. In this paper, we discuss the ideas they developed, their construction techniques, the roles individuals took on while building, and suggestions for future toolkits.

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Figure 1: Soft Speakers: digitally embroidered audio and haptic actuators on fabrics in three steps: 1) Digital design of the speaker pattern using Adobe Illustrator or Artistic Digitizer Software, 2) Digital fabrication using conductive thread in a digital embroidery machine; 3) Implementation into soft interfaces and wearables