The Concept of Psychotextiles; Interactions between Changing Patterns and the Human Visual Brain, by a Novel Composite SMART Fabric

A new SMART fabric concept is reported in which visual changes of the material are designed to influence different human emotions. This is achieved by developing a novel electrochromic composite yarn, knitted into pattern-changing fabrics, which has high response in temperature change and uniform contrast. The influence of these pattern-changing effects on the response of the human visual brain is investigated further by using event-related potential (ERP). Four SMART pattern-changing fabric pairs were used in this experiment. Each fabric presents two patterns interactively with different, but complementary or opposing, pattern attributes. 20 participants took part in the experiment, in which they were exposed to the patterns, while their visual brain activities were recorded. Comparisons of the three prominent ERP components; P1, N1, and P2 that correspond to the two patterns of each fabric have shown significant differences in the latency and amplitude of these components. These differences show that patterns and pattern-changing cause different visual impacts and that these changes influence our level of attention and processing effort. The study concludes that with the pattern changing ability of these thermochromic hybrid materials we can create designs with attributes that can directly manipulate user emotions, which we like to call ‘psychotextiles’. Our study also poses much wider questions of our image processing process in relation to design and art.