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Research through design allows creating a dialogue with the material. It uses making and reflection on action as a generator of knowledge. Our aim is to explore the opportunities and challenges of smart textiles. The Fablab is our set up, a place that allows us to combine the hacking- scientific-, and design community. It stimulates collaboration and the knowledge exchange needed for the development of smart textile systems. A collaborative prototyping workshop for medical products combined two worlds. The textile world in Saxion aims at incorporating conductive materials into textile structures and functional- / 3D printing to create systems for applications such as flexible heating systems and wearable technology. We combined this with the world of Industrial Design at TU/e, focused on the design of intelligent products, systems and services by the research through design approach. The collaboration between these different disciplines speeded up the process by reducing the resistance to the new and skipped the frustration on failure.

Background: Soft wearables include clothing and textile-based accessories that incorporate smart textiles and soft electronic interfaces to enable responsive and interactive experiences. When designed well, soft wearables leverage the cultural, sociological and material qualities of textiles, fashion and dress; diverse capabilities and meanings of the body; as well as the qualities and capabilities afforded by smart and programmable elements. Textiles behave in particular ways. They are part of culture. No matter a person's views on fashion, dress, their own or others' body, they will have an intimate relationship with textiles, as they are one of the few products worn much of the time, often in direct contact with the body. When designing wearables a designer must consider a range of requirements that do not typically demand focus when designing products that are not worn, including: sensitivity to material detail; an eye for fit and comfort on bodies with diverse shapes and movement capabilities; openness to a diversity of meanings that may be generated; as well as consideration of wearers' intimate relations with technology. Soft wearables allow for greater scope within these requirements. Results: In this article, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of designing soft wearables, applying notions of situatedness and personal meaning-making to understand and posit values in relation to outcomes. We present three design cases with different uses of the body, material, and context; and reflect on how these different uses impact the design process (challenges and oportunities). Conclusion: We provide three broad recommendations on how to ideate, explore and prototype to aid wearables research and development to arrive at rich interactions that are soft, embodied, situated and connected.

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Normally, the paradigm used to study user experience is based on the hypothetic-deductive method but this paradigm can present disadvantages like low results reliability or difficulties to carry out field studies.In this article, a method based on the Socratic paradigm is suggested for analyzing the user-product psychological relationship. Nowadays the Socratic paradigm is only used in some post-modern psychology schools, which applies Socratic techniques for psychological exploration and treatment.Based on this principle an expert-to-expert conversation is established between psychologist and patient. The user can be an expert in the usage of a product whilst the interviewer is an expert in UX studies. Thus, much more reliable information of the user-product relationship can be obtained. Applying this paradigm as a constructive and systematic event allows for increasing the reliability in qualitative user experience studies.