DXARTS 490A: E-textiles & Wearables for Art & Design - Fall 2025

Very excited to be able to offer the E-textiles + Wearables course this past fall quarter. This course weaves together craft and computation through the study of electronic textiles, soft circuits, and wearable technology. Through hands-on prototyping, students explore the body as both a second skin and an interface for interactive systems.

Coursework combines smart materials, digital fabrication, and hand-crafted electronics with creative programming in Arduino. Students have the opportunity to experiment with techniques like vinyl and laser cutting, computerized embroidery and knitting, and the cultivation of biomaterials, and also to design custom sensors and actuators for their own interactive wearables.

E-textiles and wearable computing extend into diverse fields—multimedia performance, interaction and fashion design, contemporary dance, sound and visual composition, game and interface design, IoT systems, medical monitoring, quantified self applications, and education. This course aims to invite students to critically and creatively imagine new ways technology can be worn, embodied, and experienced.

A screenshot of the class Miro board with our bibliography, slides, circuits, skill building videos and examples projects.

I am thrilled to report that the resulting prototypes were whimsical, unique and weird, in the most beautiful way possible… From full interactive sleeves, to silicone skins, speculative wearables for population control and surveillance to lunar interfaces, from oceanography data physicalizations with thermochromic pigments to actuating textiles that react to the position of body in relation to Venus, the students worked hard and persevered and the outcomes were spectacular…