Data Embroidery with Black-and-White Textures

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of black-and-white textures for data embroidery, addressing challenges, evaluating textures, and demonstrating practical applications through a family survey and embroidered canvas bag.

Contribution

It introduces a workflow for designing black-and-white textures for data embroidery and evaluates their performance and suitability in practical scenarios.

Findings

Black-and-white textures are effective for machine embroidery.

The workflow facilitates designing suitable textures for data representation.

Embroidery can effectively visualize personal family data.

Abstract

We investigated data embroidery with black-and-white textures, identifying challenges in the use of textures for machine embroidery based on our own experience. Data embroidery, as a method of physically representing data, offers a unique way to integrate personal data into one's everyday fabric-based objects. Owing to their monochromatic characteristics, black-and-white textures promise to be easy to employ in machine embroidery. We experimented with different textured visualizations designed by experts and, in this paper, we detail our workflow and evaluate the performance and suitability of different textures. We then conducted a survey on vegetable preferences within a family and created a canvas bag as a case study, featuring the embroidered family data to show how embroidered data can be used in practice.