The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
In this work, we promote capacitive sensing as a versatile smart textile modality through a collection of functional wearable designs. Considering the large variety of possible garment design concepts, we outline an approach to implement smart sensing technology into garments while maintaining these diverse design possibilities. After introducing the basic functionalities of capacitive sensing and the process of designing and building a smart garment, we present an assortment of garments enabled by this technology within the MoCa’Collection. Each of the projects serves a different purpose, built by people representing different backgrounds from electrical engineers, computer scientists, digital artists to smart fashion designers, starting from technical design over digital art to our latest design of a strongly design-oriented full-body capturing suit implementing the proposed technology.