E-Mending Workshop: Healing the broken bonds between people and garments with e-textiles

Abstract

The Abiti Parlanti workshop series situates within the community mending workshop formats and expands the repairing activity from learning how to repair clothes to how to repair our emotional broken bonds with our clothes. The paper addresses two cases of workshops done with 13 participants and emphasizes the role of tools, the workshop place and the different knowledge types generated during a collective learning process that is augmented with technology. The main question of the workshop series is: can we prolong the use of garments if we could listen to what they want to tell us? The paper draws on the insights gathered from the workshops that bring an added value to used garments by embedding a story into them while putting the wearer into an unusual and new interaction with the garments.