texTile: Making and Re-making Crochet Granny Square Garments Through Computational Design and 3D-printed Connectors

The rapid turnover of clothing contributes significantly to textile waste. Modular garment-making offers a potential solution by extending garment lifetimes through repair, resizing, and re-purposing, but producing modular garments introduces challenges not supported by existing design approaches or fabrication techniques. We explore the integration of computational design and digital fabrication to propose an alternative path for fashion, where making and re-making become integral to our relationship with garments. We present texTile, a modular fashion workflow that enables designers to assemble reusable crochet tiles into garments. To support our workflow, we developed digitally fabricated connectors for easy assembly and disassembly, a custom pattern solver and user interface to guide garment design, and a visualization tool to help plan manual assembly and reassembly. We conducted a user study with four experienced crocheters. Our results show that texTile can support the construction of tailored garments that integrate re-use as a core principle.