Hi there,

Welcome to our blog! Here we will keep you posted on our design case project, called Vibe-ing. We work on this project at the Eindhoven University of Technology, in cooperation with CRISP (Creative Industry Scientific Programme), Textiel Museum, TextielLab, and Metatronics. The main goal of Vibe-ing project is to explore the design space for smart textiles; a garment that can vibrate (see picture). Very low vibrations have been shown to strengthen muscles, which could help prevent osteoporosis. Therefore, we will focus on a target group that has a highly increased risk for osteoporosis: women in and after menopause.

Vibe-ing garment (Photo: Kristi Kuusk)

Can smart textiles be useful for women in and after menopause? And how should they be applied? During this project, a full design cycle will be completed (i.e., ‘exploration/investigation’, ‘concept derivation’, ‘ prototype development’, ‘prototype testing and evaluation’, ‘finalizing’).

 But first, let’s get you familiar with the team members…

Indre: environmental psychologist, researcher and designer with a main interest in healthcare environments design and light psychology & design. The possibility to help women to go through quite a big change in their life – menopause – is the reason she is extremely interested and motivated to be in the Vibe-ing team. She is looking forward to exploring the design space and defining the final concept of the Vibe-ing design.

Derec: is an interaction designer and engineer, who has broad research interests in Human-Computer Interaction, mainly focusing on new Interaction Techniques. Regarding the Vibe-ing project, he is interested in designing smart/interactive textiles for the specific application domain.

Petr: is a human-centered designer and HCI researcher focused on UX and interaction design, user research, and applied psychology. He is passionate about working on the Vibe-ing project, because the goal is not only to use technology to please people, but to help them to overcome complicated and unpleasant season of their life.

Dominika: is a user experience designer focusing on developing intelligent products, interactive systems and user-friendly services solutions in a medical care and well-being themes mainly. She spends her spare time by crafting and is currently using these skills to dive deeper into the development of wearable electronics and smart textiles. Therefore her professional as well as personal skills and interests brought her to work on the vibe-ing project where she hopes to add her designer value to the team work and product development.

Carmen: has a PhD in psychology and is always interested in creating and improving products that facilitate people’s lives. Loves talking to people to find out why they do what they do. Textiles, and especially knitting, is one of her latest passions. That she now can combine psychology and textiles makes her more than enthusiastic. 

Overall website: http://www.crispplatform.nl/smart-textile-services/smart-textile-services

TU/e team: Martijn ten Bhömer, Eunjeong Jeon, Oscar Tomico, Kristi Kuusk