Wearable Bits: Scaffolding Creativity with a Prototyping Toolkit for Wearable E-textiles

Smart garment and wearable e-Textile prototypes are difficult to co-design because of the variety of expertise needed (garment design, sewing skills, hardware prototyping, and software programming). To help with this, we developed a toolkit for prototyping wearable e-Textiles, named Wearable Bits, which enables co-design with non-expert users without demanding sewing, hardware or software skills. We developed a low-fidelity and medium-fidelity experience prototype of the toolkit and ran a series of workshops where non-expert users designed their own e-Textile wearables using Wearable Bits. In this paper, we discuss the ideas they developed, their construction techniques, the roles individuals took on while building, and suggestions for future toolkits.