Interactive Textiles & Assisted Living
Interfaces that disappear into curtains, sofas, and clothing — and whether the people meant to live with them actually want to.
For a while the ambient computing literature promised interfaces woven into the environment, and then mostly built demonstrations nobody had asked for. The INTUITEX project took the opposite route: build the interactive textiles, and study acceptance as seriously as the sensing.
The technical work produced textile input controllers, curtain and furniture interfaces, and Gardeene!, a textile control for the home. The empirical work asked who would actually have such things in their living room. Age, gender, and general technology attitude predict acceptance strongly, adopters and rejecters form distinguishable groups rather than a continuum, and a conjoint study of consumer preferences showed which product attributes people will genuinely pay for as opposed to merely rate highly. One of the more useful results was a set of design and communication guidelines: an invisible interface has to announce that it exists, and how it announces itself changes whether it is adopted.
The ambient assisted living work shares the population and the caution. Older adults are the group most often designed for and least often designed with, and technology aimed at them is routinely justified by a demographic argument rather than by anything the intended users said. The responsible research and innovation duty I have argued for here is not a compliance exercise — it is the difference between a product and a well-meant imposition.
