Design

ʻEveryday Companions. Meaning-Making Process Through Handbag Designʾ is a practice-based doctoral thesis.
The 21st century has witnessed significant growth in the handbag market since handbags have become an essential everyday accessory, a portable manifestation rather than a functional product. The subject of the thesis is handbag design, and the research emphasis is on the cultural construction of the meanings of bags because handbags reflect changing everyday needs and the thinking of the time being relevant both on personal and cultural-historical levels. Handbags of this thesis are taken as independent sculptural and functional objects that are close to but separate from the human body; the thesis concentrates on handbag design and designing and excludes the meaning-making involved in product marketing.
The doctoral thesis applies research through design and the semiotic approach to connect the past and the present of handbag design in order to explain the communicative potential and the cultural production of meanings of handbags through linkages between the physical characteristics of bags and their perception past and present. The study asks: How is it possible for a handbag to communicate meaning and how can the designer generate meanings in the handbag he/she designs?
The thesis presents three creative cases. The first case focuses on the novel characteristics of bag design; in particular, those considered innovations and their meanings. In contrast to the novel, the second case aims to define a classic bag and concentrates on the most enduring features of handbags. The third creative case focuses on the Estonian-origin handbag designs and aims to find specific features, which can be identified as Estonian design, or that defines handbags as ‘local’.
Each creative case consists of three phases. First, the historical research examines handbag design in Estonia from 1918 to 1940. The historical period between the world wars was the first period of the independence of Estonia but, more importantly, the period bursting with innovative designing and first social rules towards carrying handbags, both locally and internationally, was chosen as the most inspiring and highly relevant in handbag history from the viewpoint of a designer and a practitioner. The research is based on the thematic content analysis of 15 periodicals and object analyses of 250 handbags from the collections of the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, Tallinn City Museum, the Estonian History Museum and the author. Second, the creative outcome of the cases includes three collections of bags – ʻBags for Dreamers Onlyʾ, ʻBags for Collectors Onlyʾ and ʻBags for Meʾ - whose design processes are informed by the most outstanding features from the historical analysis. The second phase explains the principles of the design process, describes and presents images of prototypes in detail and reflects on the bag making. The third phase collects and analyses contemporary feedback from respondents on the created handbags. Feedback observations and interviews allowed to compare past and present perceptions to detect characteristics of bags in which meanings have remained similar or changed over the years. Feedback analysis helped to understand how handbags are perceived and interpreted, thus revealing the potential of meaning-making through handbag design.
The results of the creative cases imply that meanings can be designed when the potential and likely connotations of specific characteristics of bags for various audiences and markets are known beforehand. Knowing the design principles behind the physical characteristics makes it possible to design the desired meanings. The findings reveal the potential for innovating the meaning of bags - a new reason and direction for bag design.

DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:

Smart textiles with its vast range of possibilities provide a considerable opportunity for societal sustainability for the waste-oriented fashion industry. May the new textiles react to the environment, wearer, have a mind of its own or simply provoke and inspire people -it is a great tool for the transition from the product-oriented industry to the service-minded economy. Fashion field needs to mature and adapt to the new rules set by the user within today's environment. While developing the new field of smart textiles, this paper stresses the importance of learning from traditional crafts and the value of craftsmanship. We start by introducing the importance of crafting and connecting it to the industrialized way of producing. Then, we ask whether we could merge valuable insights from both in order to develop the smart textiles area. Later, you will find an example project merging Quick Response (QR) codes with traditional embroidery that inspired a set of TechCrafts explorations in a form of student projects. In case of the embroidered QR codes, the link to technology is an add-on feature to textiles. In the other examples, craftsmanship technologies are used to create the textile substrate itself. These explorations are the input for a discussion about the role of craftsmanship and skills in developing materials with interactive properties that is held with relation to the possibilities for societal sustainability.

Bedtime Stories is a proposal for a long-lastingenvironmentally, economically and societally sustainable smart textile service. It is a set of woven bed linen with images that can be recognized by a custom made fairy-tale application. This new way of story creation is an opportunity to share personal experiences and pass that wisdom through generations. Therefore contributing to a better quality of life. Bedtime Stories is part of a research-throughdesign project. It involves crafts (methods and values) in the environmental load of textiles and garments production, selling, wearing and disposing area. Multiple iterations of Bedtime Stories gives insight into how we have been "weaving" traditions together with digital technologies.

DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:

Technologies change rapidly our perception of reality, moving from augmented to virtual to magical. While e-textiles are a key component in exergame or space suits, the transformative potential of the internal side of garments to create embodied experiences still remains largely unexplored. This paper is the result from an art-science collaborative project that combines recent neuroscience findings, body-centered design principles and 2D vibrotactile array-based fabrics to alter one's body perception. We describe an iterative design process intertwined with two user studies on the effects on bodyperceptions and emotional responses of various vibration patterns within textile that were designed as spatial haptic metaphors. Our results show potential in considering materials (e.g., rocks) as sensations to design for body perceptions (e.g., being heavy, strong) and emotional responses. We discuss these results in terms of sensory effects on body perception and synergetic impact to research on embodiment in virtual environments, human-computer interaction, and e-textile design. The work brings a new perspective to the sensorial design of embodied experiences which is based on "material perception" and haptic metaphors, and highlights potential opportunities opened by haptic clothing to change body-perception.

DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:

In a time of increasing interest in living and supporting life with mental illnesses, social design offers new tools and solutions for improving human livelihood and well-being. This paper presents student projects completed for a social design course in 2017 and 2018 at the Estonian Academy of Arts that combine traditional crafts with interaction design mindset and skills, resulting in social design work that tackles nonverbal communication with and between persons with different cognitive abilities. The paper compares the development processes of student work for a social design course from two consecutive years, sheds light on the project evaluations, future use in the real life context, and allows for a discussion of the future of design for social interaction between persons with different cognitive abilities mediated by interactive artifacts. The process of involving multidisciplinary instructors team and medical specialist into the design education process is described and re...

How can children develop a healthy level of bodyawareness and social sensitivity in a technologymediated life full of computers and digital devices? With WORM-E, an interactive soft toy for children, we explore haptic sensations and invite for enhanced bodily and social play experiences through pausing the smartphone usage. To realize the WORM-E prototype, we used e-textile techniques and technologies, including a microcontroller for controlling actuators and NFC (Near Field Communication) tags for communication with a smartphone app. Our project contributes a design exemplar on how the future of play could look like when body movements and haptic material qualities of tangible artefacts are combined with interactions through digital technologies.

Our complex and rapidly changing world presents us with profound societal challenges, but also offers tremendous opportunities for new technology to respond to those challenges. Several recent EU initiatives have enabled participants from a diverse array of disciplines to engage in common spaces for developing solutions to existing challenges and to imagine possible futures. This includes collaborations between the arts and sciences, fields which have traditionally contributed very different forms of knowledge, methodology, results and measures of success. They also speak very different languages. Magic Lining is a collaborative project involving participants from the fields of e-textile design, neuroscience and human-computer interaction (HCI). Magic Lining combines the findings of their respective disciplines to develop a ‘vibrotactile’ garment utilising soft, interactive materials and is designed to alter the wearer’s perception of their own body. Here we explain the process of d...