Craft qualities translated from traditional crafts to smart textile services

In this article we suggest craft and craftsmanship as an inspiration to design more sustainable smart textile services. We look into the opportunities that interactive properties and services bring into the textile and garment life cycle. We use traditional crafts as a source of inspiration for the design and as a reference to analyse emerged smart textile examples with craft experts. We demonstrate the process in the form of a dialogue between the smart textile as material, the designer-researcher and the community of craft experts. The Research through Design activities result in three iterations of the smart textile proposal, suggesting Augmented Reality as an extra layer on the textile material, and a set of design guidelines as craft qualities. We demonstrate two versions of craft qualities found and evaluated in the Muhu skirt as a traditional folk garment, as well as ‘QR-coded Embroidery’, ‘Bedtime Stories’ and ‘Textales’ as smart textile exam ples. The story of defining, evaluating and reflecting on the act of designing as the generator of knowledge illustrates how the community becomes part of the Research through Design process