The Virtual Life of Textile Innovations: Exploring Visual Haptics Potentials That Shape Multisensory User Experience

The fashion industry currently needs to accelerate its sustainable transition while also facing an intense digitisation process involving both design and production. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding the opportunities offered by digitisation and the development of recycled, bio-based and low-waste materials, market uptake of textile innovations remains limited. This chapter explores the potential of haptic visuality—the sensation of touching things just by looking at them—to create meaningful interactions for the online experience of textile innovations, to facilitate multisensory experience and thus encouraging better understanding and engagement with these new materials. This project uses an action-research framework to investigate the exploitation of visual haptics strategies for textile innovations through two phases: An experimental fabric hand-testing stage that builds on theories of cinematic haptics and integrates a micro-camera to explore the tactile experiences of twelve designers while manipulating four textile innovations; and a workshop with selected designers that builds on theories of semantic haptics to exploit the potential of integrating the audio-visual recordings resulting from the tests into an online user experience. Results show that haptic properties of textile innovations can be induced to an important extent using visual experience. However, the complexity of the human sensorium makes it impossible to create a universal taxonomy for haptic textile experiences that builds on cinematic haptics. Instead, creative processes building on semantic haptics, i.e. using visual haptics as a metaphor, can provide fruitful ways to design suggestive virtual experiences for the exploration of textile innovations.