Future Fashion – at the Interface

My working hypothesis is that the fields of fashion and wearables are most advanced when it comes to developing devices that are integrated in everyday objects. Designers are pioneers with regard to ubiquitous computing and infrastructural intelligence. But there is yet another point that turns fashion and more specific digital skins into an interesting field of research: The close proximity to the user's body. Digital skin tend to merge artificial and biological life. They allow artificial limbs to sense their surroundings and they might soon be able to enhance human senses through adding artificial sense organs to the biological setup. The intertwining of artificial and biological sensing alters deeply the social and material structures of our life-worlds. In this paper, I will propose a phenomenological concept to describe technological key features and understand their impact on human life. My aim is to generalize the idea of digital skin under the Merleau-Pontian term of the flesh and propose a hybrid concept of the digital flesh as paradigmatic for future technologies.

Journal of textile science and technology, 2020

This article seeks to highlight some significant aspects that involve the cyber universe in today's society, linking these concepts with the evolution of fashion in the technological segment, since it is understood as an object of body extension, and technologies understood as extension support for this body. Is based on a supposed premise that it is necessary to understand that, when discussing the possibilities that wearables bring, one cannot neglect the pervasive performance of these devices permanently in the coexistence between humans and technology, to the point of one day not dissociating both?

UXPA, User Experience, 2013

Citation: FLANAGAN, PATRICIA, 2029: Fashion Futurism UXPA, User Experience, User Experience, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2nd Quarter 2013, www.uxpa.org 2013, pp. 24-26. "Futuristic fashion depicts the ideologies of the period in history when they were created far more accurately than they manage to predict future fabrication materials or functions. Let’s look beyond the traditional perspectives of fashion and consider wearables as an interface between the body and the world. Fashion, beyond aesthetic design that engages with flows of information and integrates seamlessly with the physical world – blurring the boundaries between body, clothing, and the physical environment, between the real and the artificial body – biotechnology is mashing-up the chemistry and biology of the body with new intelligent materials. This article presents two key concepts to interpret future fashion: fungibility (i.e., ) and empathy and discussed examples of clothing as a means for expressing data. For user interfaces to become genuinely intelligent interactive systems, we must enable the development of interactive systems that can recognize unpredictable state changes. User interfaces of the future will acknowledge the relationship between people, places and things as emergent spaces that generate meaning through everyday activity and therefore ones in which users themselves act as co-designers. Acknowledgement: The author acknowledges that this article was written in conjunction with the academic paper 'Future Fashion at the Interface', designed as a more accessable version for non-academic readers, it contains similar material and references."

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2017

The emergence of a critical and speculative design philosophy is evident across a multitude of disciplines and practices and as such is articulated through various methodologies and terminology. Wearable technology is evolving into non-traditional devises, permeating forms from data clouds to implants, breaking down traditional borders of the body, of inside and outside. Our relationship with wearable artefacts poses questions that challenge the notion of who we are and how we understand ourselves. This paper takes a humanities approach to the future-self, exploring how the role of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) mediates experience through wearables. Examples are discussed from the author's practice as ARTographer (artist, researcher, teacher) as well as experience with skin psychology, machine assisted living and organ transplant. Wearables and smart textile prototypes created by the author's tertiary students are analyzed as: speculative following Stuart Candy's futurology methodology (2010); critically designed following Anthony Dunne's approach (2006); and critically made following Matt Ratto, Sara Ann Wylie & Kirk Jalbert's approach (2014). The article first describes and contextualizes the methodological and philosophical position of this approach, describing how it pertains to art and design practice, then elucidates potential directions for wearable HCI extending Star and Griesemer's notion of boundary objects (1989).

The emergent field of smart textiles is recognized as an interdisciplinary domain drawing from fields including electrical engineering, materials science, textile design, physiology and interaction design as well as involving specialists from application areas such as sports and health science. While each discipline has contributed specific knowledge, an initial focus on technical development has led to an emphasis on function and scientific discourse, ignoring relevant fields like dress and fashion and post-cognitive perspectives that prioritize materiality and embodied experience. As the field continues to develop, different theoretical perspectives are needed to inform new conceptual and methodological approaches to support this expanding, combinatorial field. The notion of embodied interaction, which recognizes the fundamental importance of engaging and re-conceptualizing technology through the experience of the body and its senses, is critical to this effort. Technology oriented approaches informed by theories of human-computer interaction (HCI) have underpinned the development of interactive textiles. This paper considers the limitations of HCI approaches, and those of normative semiotic theories of fashion in relation to the design of soft wearable technologies. Two recent smart garment design projects that have used embodied interaction approaches are discussed in relation to three theoretical perspectives: firstly from current dress/fashion theory, where notions drawn from new materialism and embodiment theory have led to a reconceptualization of dress as corporeal experience; secondly that of somatics, an approach where knowledge is developed from within the lived experience of the moving body; and thirdly in relation to new material ontologies that address the digital materiality of smart textiles. The theoretical and methodological approaches discussed in the paper and explored through the projects introduce new ideas and methods to inform the design of soft wearable technologies and smart textiles.

2019

Nexus

Flanagan, Patricia; Papadopoulos, Despina; Voss, Georgina, Intimacy and Extimacy: Ethics, Power, and Potential of Wearable Technologies, IN: Woodrow Barfield, Fundamentals of Wearable Computing and Augmented Reality, Second Edition, CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group 2015 p.32-53., 2015

INTRODUCTION The chapter is founded on the premise that current wearable technology design practices represent a reductionist view of human capacity. The democratization of technology into work, play, home, and mobile social networks in recent years has seen traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) design methodology broadened through the integration of other methodologies and knowledge from the humanities such as social science, anthropology, and ethnography. The field of HCI is inherently interdisciplinary and its history is one of the inevitable disciplinary multiculturalisms spawned by the expansive impact of technological growth. What questions should we be asking to engage a more critical design perspective? This chapter extends traditional functionalist approaches to design to engage cultural, experience-based, and techno-futurist approaches. Wearable technologies are therefore discussed in terms of their critical, political, ethical, and speculative potential, and case studies are presented to illustrate and exemplify the ideas promulgated. The chapter is organized into three sections. The first section proposes the role of the designer to be one that includes a cultural approach to designing future scenarios—one that considers ethical and speculative implications of how our embodied materiality is affected by emerging technologies. What is the relationship of the self to the proliferating wearable technologies? How is our sense of self changing as new technologies mediate the space between our experience of self and the world? We develop a methodology that asks designers and technologists to build future scenarios and envision how our embodied materiality is affected by emerging technologies. Using a philosophical framework we explore design and its implications on the relationship of the self to the self and to social relationships. We then investigate how technologies such as Google Glasses and Quantified Self applications inform our relationship to our self and redefine our social interactions. The second section discusses the self and the social politic of wearable technologies from macro to micro perspectives. Considering wider supply and production chains and regulatory systems whose existence shapes the production and meaning of wearables—both their material form and design, and the movement of gathered data from the body into wider dispersed networks of power. Moving from the micro (technology/body) to the macro (systems of production), we consider where control lies across these networks, at what unit of analysis, and what their impact could be on the wider world as they are dispersed. The final section adopts a techno futurist approach proposing synaptic sculpture as a process for creative design that engages vibrant materiality and the interconnected body. The section describes the emergence of a new paradigm in terms of our augmented perspective—our perception of scale expanding our awareness and sensitivity across macro- and nanolevels. These new spheres of awareness become our normative environment—ones with an amplified awareness of the instability, fungability, and interconnectedness of things. This perspective promulgates the space of design to be in the interface as mediator of experience, rather than design of objects or products. We propose the need to develop a connoisseur of somesthetic qualities surrounding the design of wearables. This subverts the traditional fashion design methodology away from the trickle-down theory to one that can enhance a relationship between designer and user who can become coproducers and connects materiality to anthropology and the lived experience of the individual.