Unstable Design Lab/Superhuman Computing Lab/BEEM Lab
“Knitting Access: Exploring Stateful Textiles with People with Disabilities,” authored by Annika Muehlbradt (PhD Comp. Sci’22) and researchers Shaun Kane, director of the Superhuman Computing Lab, Laura Devendorf, director of the Unstable Design Lab, and Gregory Whiting, director of the BEEM Lab, won a DIS’22 Honorable Mention award. Muehlbradt, an alumna of the Unstable Design and Superhuman Computing labs, presented the research during the Interaction Techniques track.
“Knitting Access” addresses how non-digital textile interfaces can fit meaningfully into the lives of people with disabilities and examines the qualities of textile interfaces that are important to them. It also explores new forms of self-tracking data that may appeal to people with disabilities, such as pressing in knitted “bubbles,” to count a specific activity or mood. For instance, some of the research subjects used the knitted bubbles to count work breaks, track hydration, or to note their emotions, like anxiety.
Publication
Annika Muehlbradt, Gregory Whiting, Shaun Kane and Laura Devendorf. 2022. Knitting Access: Exploring Stateful Textiles with People with Disabilities. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1058-1070. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533551 pdf (June 13-17, 2022, Virtual Event, Australia) [Best Paper Honorable Mention Award].
