Communication-Wear | prototype as probe
Communication-Wear was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the AHRC’s Fellowships in the Creative and Performing Arts scheme, UK, 2003-2006. Communication-Wear is a clothing concept that augments the mobile phone by enabling expressive messages to be exchanged remotely, by conveying a sense of touch, and presence. It proposes to synthesise conventions and cultures of fashion with those of mobile communications, where there are shared attributes in terms of communication and expression. Using garment prototypes as research probes as part of an on-going iterative co-design process, we endeavoured to mobilise participants’ tacit knowledge in order to gauge user perceptions on touch communication in a lab-based trial. The aim of this study was to determine whether established sensory associations people have with the tactile qualities of textiles could be used as signs and metaphors for experiences, moods, social interactions and gestures, related to interpersonal touch. The findings are used to inspire new design ideas for textile actuators for use in touch communication in successive iterations.
The Communication-Wear concept seeks to operate within, and contribute to, the emergence of a new genre in clothing and fashion, where fashion and ICT converge. This research is multi-disciplinary, drawing on expertise from fashion and textile design, electronics, wearable computing, and user research.
Communication-Wear proposes to marry conventions and cultures of fashion, as being an expressive medium that connects people with the social world, with principles of nonverbal communication and current cultures of mobile communications. Fashion/clothing and mediated communication technologies share common attributes in terms of how they enable people to construct an identity, to be expressive, to differentiate themselves, and which enables communication between people allowing them to form communities. People do this through their consumption of these commodities and services. The links between expression and nonverbal communication through body movement and touch in human communication have long been identified. Mobile phones are already ‘affective technologies – that is, objects which mediate the expression and exchange of feelings and emotions’ [Lasen, A, Vodafone]. The design framework for Communication-Wear is informed by these diverse strands of research.
Our research locates potential youth consumers at the centre of the development of clothing prototypes by engaging them as co-developers and evaluators. Using design-led techniques we aim to determine what and how people might communicate through augmented clothing, and how this might fit in with, and support their everyday communications. We developed a smart textile system and integrated it into prototype garments that provided a menu of touch expressions that the garment can sense and actuate. The garments enabled sensory messaging and social presence. A smart textile system comprising sensors, actuators and processing units was integrated into garments, and each garment was twinned with a mobile phone via Bluetooth, enabling remote communication between them. Vodafone R&D developed the SMS platform. The smart textile garment systems were developed by Philippa Brock (Subject Leader Woven Textiles, BA Textile Design, CSM), Andrew Moore (Circuitry Limited) and Sharon Baurley.
In a way we used the prototypes as research probes as a means to create conditions in which participants could experience, play and dream, possibly gauging a deeper level of knowledge or tacit knowledge about user’s desires, preferences and behaviours, as well as the way the concept makes them feel. Our approach aims to gain insight into what some of the catalysts and drivers of future consumer fashion wearable technology that permits touch communication might be, and to explore methods to design appropriable smart clothing. In order to do this we have conducted a series of studies using these probes to gain insight into how people might appropriate the functionality and create their own meanings through visual, aesthetic, and/or tactile codes. The immediate aim of the studies was to determine whether established sensory associations people have with the tactile qualities of textiles could be used as signs and metaphors for experiences, moods, social interactions and gestures, related to interpersonal touch. The studies formed an integral part of an iterative design process. The user studies were conducted in collaboration with Erik Geelhoed, HP Labs, Bristol, and The Watershed Media Centre, Bristol.
DesignProbes
