Troy Nachtigall

Aarhus University | AU · Department of Engineering

The process of making adaptive and responsive wearables on the scale of the body has often been a process where designers use off-the-shelf parts or hand-crafted electronics to fabricate garments. However, recent research has shown the importance of emergence in the process of making. Second Skins is a multistakeholder exploration into the creation...

A designerly journey into textiles and HCI leads to thinking about data as a material for a cybernetic future.

Design games are rarely used to design shoes but data and emerging digital fabrication systems are rapidly changing how designers make things. We envision a near future where shoes are personalised using algorithmic, parametric, and generative systems that are data-driven. In this article, we describe and deploy a design game for shoes to help desi...

Wearable and e-textiles as a field has tended to overlook its own documentation, as notions and overarching ideas are developed over time and across individual projects. We would like to begin addressing this by charting the development of Digital Craftsmanship through a number of projects over time. Practically, we propose to show a small selectio...

Mechanical meta-material structures (MMS) are designed structures with mechanical properties not found in ordinary materials. MMS can now be created far more easily using digital manufacturing. We explore how different MMS can be combined, through the design of a shoe sole. Thereby showing the potential of using MMS to create personalized and susta...

Data is changing how we design consumer products. Shoe production is a prime example of this; foot size, footstep pressure and personal preferences can be used to design personalized shoes. Research done around metamaterials, programming materials and computational composites illustrate the possibilities of creating complex data & material relation...

Personalization of shoes is of increasing importance to designers, design researchers, and manufacturers as mass customization progresses towards ultra personalized product service systems. Many attempts have been made to design co-creation platforms that allow end users to personalize their own shoes. Those co-creation platforms primarily concentr...

This paper presents a structured survey of 119 publications from the proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) from 2013 to 2017. This survey on research methods and purposes is based upon a classification schema used by many others in HCI research. An extra dimension was added to the classification of research methods...

This paper describes an early design research exploration into the potential of folds and pockets to serve as places for safekeeping and secrecy in wearables. We explore what such secrecy may mean through woven data codes. We report on early material exploration, a pilot study with ten participants, and the personalization of a data object. We then...

In this case study three designers supported by multiple stakeholders created a pair of fully personalized printed high heel shoes in a period of two months for a single user. The shoes are made with soft and flexible materials for dynamic fit and use. The shoes are not only uniquely formed to the user's feet but the geometry of the material is des...

In this paper three separate approaches to recording use data are encompassed in a single shoe sole prototype. A shoe sole with electronic and nonelectronic sensors is crafted using 3D printing of flexible materials from programed g-Code. The sole is inserted into a laser cut, 3D printing reinforced shoe upper. The shoe and sole are constructed fro...

Textile Thinking and Ultra Personalization are guiding the PhD research in wearable on body sensing in the creation of garments / accessories. Textile Thinking involves the superficial surface of a design process that attempts to create a point of view to reach new understandings in design and architecture. When applied to interaction design in the...

The E-Textile Swatch Exchange is a platform for sharing physical work samples in the field of electronic textiles. The exchange wishes to emphasize the importance of physicality and quality workmanship in an increasingly digital world. Individuals and collaborative efforts participate in the exchange by submitting a unique swatch design of their ow...