This workshop will take place on Saturday April 26. The first half of the day will be spent at the CHI venue and all participants will be invited to join us at the Silk Museum in Yokohama Japan for the afternoon session. This workshop is intended for anyone attending CHI who engages (or is interested in engaging) textile craft materials and techniques in their research. In it, we will share some of our materials, objects, tools, and patterns, develop new skills and speculate on future research directions. Our Japanese colleagues will bring materials, samples, and compile resources prior to the workshop that will form the basis of our making and speculating activities. Our goal is to create a space for practitioners across CHI to connect and share their soft practices. By doing so, we hope to advance textiles at CHI by building a collective awareness of possibilities and practices.
CHI is becoming home to an emerging community of researchers and practitioners engaging with textiles as a design and research material. This work is spread across a range of areas from digital fabrication to haptics. This workshop offers the opportunity for the broader research community to share techniques and ideas that underpin these textile practices at CHI. Knitting, weaving, embroidery, hand-stitching, quilting, garment making, dying, felting, paper making, etc. offer distinct functional and aesthetic qualities while engaging similar materials and modes of working. We propose this workshop to create a community meeting place for CHI researchers engaging textiles in any capacity. We suggest a day of skill sharing and collective speculating grounded in the textiles techniques and histories of Japan.