Sofia Guridi is designing a better world with smart textiles
Sofia Guridi, a doctoral student at Aalto University’s Bioinnovation Center, wants to introduce bio-based smart textiles that help improve people’s everyday life.
Crafting Sustainable Interfaces: Bio-based Electronic Textiles for Human-computer Interaction
Aalto University Bioinnovation Center doctoral candidate Sofía Guridi visited ITU Copenhagen University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology to learn about critical fabulation approaches and investigate the practical use implications for bio-based eTextiles.
Electronic textiles (eTextiles) are explored as flexible, soft, and ubiquitous interfaces across domains such as performance art, healthcare, and smart homes, yet their sustainability challenges demand urgent attention. Recent research highlights the broader inclusion of biomaterials to reduce their environmental impact. This has opened up new functionalities by combining biomaterial properties, textile techniques, and electronics.
To explore the practical implications of these new material assemblies and to include critical fabulations' perspectives, doctoral candidate Sofía Guridi worked with Professor Vasiliki Tsaknaki at ITU Copenhagen, Denmark, and with the Interaction Design Team (IxD) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in the fall 2025.
During the 10-week collaboration with ITU and 2 weeks with KTH, the work focused on designing and implementing workshops, ideation sessions, and hands-on prototyping, as well as participating in various events and engaging with a top-tier community of HCI researchers.
The outcomes include a seminar presentation and a workshop within the “Feminist Technoscience in Practice” series, a collaborative work on algorithms' skins, a collection of prototypes of bio-based soft materials for inflatable wearables with Dr. Alice Haynes, and a contribution to the successful publication “Bio-based pH-sensing Materials for Everyday Intimate Care in Matrescence” with Dr. Jiwei Zhou.
This work has been done with the support of Jane and Aatos Erkko foundation.
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Aalto University Bioinnovation Center
To achieve human wellbeing in planetary boundaries, we need new sustainable solutions to wisely use our natural resources. The Bioinnovation Center especially focuses on innovations in sustainable bio-based materials, with special focus on textiles and packaging.