From 13th to 17th of June 2011, The Swedish School of Textiles organized five days long Smart Textiles Summer Campwith the theme of ‘Future E-Textiles Master craftsmanship’ . Twenty experts from the field of Textile design, E-textiles, Wearable Technology Art and interaction design gathered from all over Europe to share their knowledge and skills, and explore the new possibilities.

During these five days, we held eight skill-share workshops, in which selected participants lead the workshop and shared their specialized techniques in intermediate-expert level. These skill-share workshops covered from weaving, knitting to electro plating.
In the evenings, we held cozy discussion sessions, covering the topics of documentation/passing on trades, future of smart textiles/ complexity of the analogue world.
The camp ended with a day and a half of intense collaborative project work, in which participants split into groups based on their areas of expertise and interests (textiles design, performance, craft and interaction design). Each groups were asked to continue the discussion on the theme and develop a prototype that communicates the idea.

The Smart Textiles Summer Camp was a unique event, in a sense that these experts spent literally five days and night together working, discussing, eating and sleeping together. Yes, we really “camp”-ed together.
The camp was hosted at The Rydal Design Center, outside of Boras city area where there is a lot of nature and silence.

There was a much discussion and learning during this five days, and we hope to continue organizing such kind of exchanging opportunities in future.

For the detail documentation of the summer camp, please visit >> stdl.se/summercamp/

Summer Camp was supported by Längmanska Kulturfonden and Smart Textiles initiative (http://www.smarttextiles.se)
Thanks to Ludvig Svensson AB (http://www.ludvigsvensson.se/) for their fabric donation!