Ulla Vahteri

Healing Textile

Dialogue between textiles and healthcare application

The Healing Textile project suggests design approaches to improve the wearing experience of compression textiles in the healthcare field. By exploring compression textile applications and utilizing knitted and woven structures, the project presents different textile prototypes focusing on textiles' visual, functional, and tactile properties.

Healing Textile is a research-driven textile design project that explores the use of compression textiles in the field of healthcare and suggests development ideas for these textiles.

Compression textiles are an essential part of medical treatment. Especially as a long-term application, they have great significance for the user. The key challenges of these applications include unpleasant wearing experiences that may decrease users’ motivation to wear these functional textiles. With an emphasis on knitted and woven structures, this project searches for ways to improve the wearing experience from the textile design perspective.

The focus is on textiles' visual, functional, and tactile properties, such as utilizing multi-layered structures, innovative material combinations, and functional pattern areas. The collection of compression textile prototypes aims to provide novel and creative ideas for future product development.