“When designing wearables, wholly new requirements arise: a sensitivity for material details, an eye for fit and comfort, and consideration of wearers’ intimate relations with technology.”

Oscar Tomico is Assistant Professor and part of the Wearable Senses Lab at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His research focuses on how to design, develop, produce and deploy Soft Wearables. This category includes clothing and textile-based accessories that incorporate smart textiles and soft electronic interfaces to enable responsive and interactive experiences.

Communication and dissemination activities in his area of research include co-organising events like the Smart services, smart production, smart textiles debate in the Disseny Hub (Barcelona, Spain, 2016), the Crafting Wearables breakout session in The Future of Fashion is Innovation (MoBA, Arnhem, 2013), and eTextile Sweatshop (Rotterdam V2_, 2012). Tomicohas curated exhibitions such as Systems Design – Eindhoven School at Design Hub Museum (Barcelona, Spain 2012), Smart Textiles – Wearable Services exhibition at TextielMuseum (Tilburg, Netherlands, 2015) and Speculate, collaborate, define – textile thinking for future ways of living at the Textile Museum (Borås, Sweden, 2017). Doctoral design works Tomico supervised have been shown in museums like Textile Museum Tilburg, Taiwan Design Museum, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Wuxi Museum of Chinese Calligraphy and Paintings, Technisches Museum Wien, La Gaité Lyrique Paris, Museum of Design Zurich, and Museum of Craft and Design SF.

Oscar Tomico holds an MSc degree in Industrial Engineering from Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain). His PhD is from the same institution, awarded cum laude in 2007 on subjective experience-gathering techniques based on constructivist psychology. Tomico briefly worked as a consultant for Telefonica R&D (Spain) and joined Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) as Assistant Professor in 2007. He has held guest positions at AUT Creative technologies (New Zealand), TaiwanTech (Taiwan), the Swedish School of Textiles (Sweden), the Institute of Advanced Architecture (Spain), University of Tsukuba (Finland) and others. In 2015, he consulted for the functional textiles department at EURECAT (Spain). In 2017, Tomico became head of the Industrial Design Bachelor’s degree program at ELISAVA University School of Design and Engineering (Spain).

• ELISAVA University School of Design and Engineering of Barcelona.

Expertise area(‘s): CA, US. (Also: DRP)

Squad: Crafting wearable senses (in the fabric of everyday life)

Exemplary graduation projects of students I coached:
FMP: Leonie Tenthof van Noorden: This fits me
FBP: Tamara Hogeweegen: Posterus Textilus

Project topics I’d like to coach

“My research revolves around 1st person perspectives to Research through Design at different scales (bodies, communities and socio-technical systems). Ranging from developing embodied ideation techniques for close or on the body applications (e.g., soft wearables), contextualized design interventions to situate design practice in everyday life, or exploring the impact of future local, distributed, open and circular socio-technical systems of production.”


Coaching style

“I focus a lot on the detailing, the making, the prototyping in terms of developing the competency Creativity and Aesthetics, and User and Society, which are my two main expertise areas, and also Design en Research Processes (DRP). I normally meet the students weekly to see the progress they make and work on the detailing. I do not  support just the result, but also the process behind it. I try to provide the students with theory and examples to support their development.”

Network

Oscar Tomico heads the Industrial Design Engineering Bachelor's Degree at Elisava, co-directs the Design for Emergent Futures Master’s Program in collaboration with IAAC, and is also assistant professor at the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology. Oscar: “ If students want to go to Catalunya (Barcelona) I can support them very well. Also, in in the field of textiles and wearables I have good contacts.”