Fashion field needs to mature and adapt to the new rules set by the user within today’s environment. While developing the new field of smart textiles, this paper stresses the importance of learning from traditional crafts and the value of craftsmanship.

The research starts by introducing the importance of crafting and connecting it to the industrialized way of producing. Then, it is asked whether valuable insights can be merged from both in order to develop the smart textiles area.

Authors: Kristi Kuusk, Dr. Oscar Tomico, Dr. Ir. Geert Langereis, Dr. Ir. Geert Langereis

Many rules for life, ways of living and making things changed during industrialization. Certain decisions and directions towards efficiency and standardizations killed older and long-lived principals of quality, individualized approach and value of handwork. Crafts were considered too time demanding for mainstream in that period, but now re-considering some decisions that led us to mass production, they sound inspiring and worth looking into. Could we learn values passed on for generations through making and transfer/translate them to the smart textiles applications? What would have a similar meaning to us today and what would get lost in translation?

Fashion industry, suffering in exhaustive sustainability issues, doesn’t need a further drive by the “next cool” thing that is growing the pile of waste in few months. Next to all the efforts done in wiser material use, reuse and recycling, vintage promotion, new business models, it needs a way to close the loop from materials and energy use to the industry and user, and back to the industry and user. (Fletcher and Grose, 2012) This is not a material driven change: it must be a deeper behavioral turn. A change that makes garments more valuable to the users: through the combined influence of the process, materials, final outcome, care taking and disposal. Influential steps need to be taken by the designer, producer, supplier and with the greatest impact: the user. This change asks for a multi-stakeholder approach, currently researched in the “CRISP Smart Textile Services” project (Bhömer, 2012), with the goal to integrate the different design and production processes of textile, technology and services.

The paper presents an example project merging Quick Response (QR) codes with traditional embroidery that inspired a set of TechCrafts explorations in a form of student projects. In case of the embroidered QR codes, the link to technology is an add-on feature to textiles. In the other examples, craftsmanship technologies are used to create the textile substrate itself. These explorations are the input for a discussion about the role of craftsmanship and skills in developing materials with interactive properties that is held with relation to the possibilities for societal sustainability.

Slow fashion means accepting diversity, producing in small scale, and trusting the partners, valuing making and maintaining and a true price of the product incorporating ecological and social costs. Within smart textiles and garments development, the main issue today is yet to explore possibilities, push borders of what is possible and propose scenarios of potential use. It is very much material, technology driven - more as a hack to prove that something can work, rather than fulfilling a need and growing upon that. Crafting smart textiles makes it a slow process, hands-on experience; it allows craftsmen to grow together with their creation.