The Importance of Textiles Hand in Comfort and Emotional Design

The aim of this paper is to verify and evaluate the variable emotional response in interacting with a well-defined matter, fabrics, through different sensorial channels in order to allow designers to set or select textile parameters according to the emotion they would like to evoke in a specific sensorial condition. The purpose is to create a universal and scientifically-based culture and language as a core for a quality control system of two fundamental elements: “hand” and comfort. The research concerned several aspects of sensorial experience of textiles through the selection of the most influential sensations in textile applications and their relative possible correlation to mechanical properties. A group of subjects in different sensorial modalities was utilized in order to analyse transfer and anticipation phenomena. Interesting deductions have been drawn by comparing objective parameters and correlated subjective sensations thereby opening up the potential to design emotional experience of textiles.