Crafting Stories: Smart and Electronic Textile Craftsmanship for Interactive Books

ABSTRACT‘Crafting Stories’ investigates the potentials of smart and electronic textile craftsmanship in the context of interactive books. A handmade interactive eTextile book, copying a handmade interactive textile book my late grandmother made, is presented as a prototypical artefact. The presentation of this practice-based research at the intersection of textile crafts, electronic and computational technology, and storytelling explicitly focuses on the interactive qualities, materials used, and the story experience. It introduces and contextualizes ‘The Book My Grandmother Might Have Made’, annotates design decisions, and pictures the making of the book. I report on early explorations of users interacting with the crafted stories and close with discussing the possibilities and perspectives of crafting tangible, embedded, and embodied interactions within (eTextile) books.