Pushing the boundaries: Students Kinneret Itzhak from the Department of Textile Design, Dafna Levi from the Department of Interior, Building and Environment Design, and Kamila Kantek from the School of Form, Poland, on exchange at the Department of Industrial Design of Shenkar presented their project at the prestigious ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) in Stockholm, Sweden, which is considered the most important in its field. 

The theme of TEI 2018 was Post-digital design, reflecting on the counter-digital tendencies and the turn to craftsmanship and old media. 

The students presented their project entitled Sew-Flow that was created during their studies at one of the transdisciplinary courses of the Kadar Center for Design and Technology, Shenkar, led by Michal Rinott, Shoval Nir, and Shachar Geiger. 

The project takes on the existing popular game played on smartphones and computers, Flow Free, and gives it a craft interpretation, utilizing cutting-edge interface technologies.

The game is a kind of puzzle, but instead of a finger drawing a track on the screen, the track is sewn with conductive yarn on a fabric interface. 

Once the right path is navigated, the fabric under the stitching magically changes its default black color, revealing the tracks in their distinct colors.

The innovative use of textile and thermochromic pigments makes it possible to take the original game to alternative directions - in this case, from digital to palpable - to be explored back in the future. 

The TEI conference is a prominent platform that presents the most recent research in the field of tangible interaction, and has been running for the past twelve years in Stockholm, Sweden.

The conference addresses issues of human-computer interaction, user experience, and novel tools and technologies, presenting innovative work through talks, interactive exhibits, posters, art installations, and more.