Crafting smart textiles : a meaningful way towards societal sustainability in the fashion field?

Smart textiles with its vast range of possibilities provide a considerable opportunity. for societal sustainability for the waste-oriented fashion industry. May the new textdes react to the environment, wearer, have a mind of its own or simply provoke and inspire people -it is a great tooi for the transition from the product-oriented industry to the service-minded economy. 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, th is paper stresses the importance of learning from traditional crafts and the value of craftsmanship. We start by introducing the importance of crafting and connecting it to the industrialized way of producing. Then, we ask whether we could merge valuable Inslghts from both in order to develop the smart textiles area . Later, you will find 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 embroldered QR codes, the link to technology is an add-on feature to textiles. In the otherexamples, craftsmanship technologies are used to create the textile substrate ItselL These explorations are the input for a discussion about the role of craftsmanshlp and skdls In . developing materials with inter