Punch-Sketching E-textiles: Exploring Punch Needle as a Technique for Sustainable, Accessible, and Iterative Physical Prototyping with E-textiles

Tangible toolkits enable individuals to explore concepts through combining components together and taking them apart. The strength and limitation of many e-textile toolkits is that threads hold them in place, and once put together they need destructive methods to take them apart. In this paper, we propose Punch-Sketching e-textiles, a drawing technique that uses a punch needle to iteratively prototype soft circuits. The benefits of this approach is sustainability and reusability where users can easily pull out circuits without damaging the materials or creating waste, while also testing out concepts using the actual threads that will be used in the final prototype. To validate our technique, we ran three studies comparing sewing and punching e-textiles through: 1) Understanding the process with two fiber artists; 2) Exploring the potential with four beginner users; and 3) Utilizing our methods further with 10 occupational therapists. Insights from these three studies include when and how to use each method, toolkit recommendations, considerations for iterative physical prototyping, sustainability, and accessibility.