Intimacy and Extimacy – Ethics, Power, and Potential of Wearable Technologies, Patricia Flanagan, Despina Papadopoulos, and Georgina Voss

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of Wearable Technologies Patricia Flanagan, Despina Papadopoulos, and Georgina Voss CONTENTS 3.1 Introduction..................................................................................................... 32 3.2 Future Scenarios: Ethical and Speculative Implications of How Our Embodied Materiality Is Affected by Emerging Technologies....................... 33 3.2.1 Garment as Anchor..............................................................................34 3.2.2 Start with Value................................................................................... 35 3.2.3 Think about the System....................................................................... 35 3.2.4 Requirements and Specifications Are for Humans Too...................... 35 3.2.5 Prototypes and Iterative Design........................................................... 36 3.2.6 Experimenting with the Future, Questioning the Present................... 36 3.2.7 Coloring............................................................................................... 37 3.2.8 Life As We Know It—The Qualified Self........................................... 37 3.3 Self and the Social Politic of Wearable Technologies..................................... 39 3.3.1 Personal Technologies, Regional Innovation....................................... 39 3.3.2 Quantifying the Intended User............................................................40 3.3.3 Tracking in the Factories..................................................................... 42 3.3.4 Bodies at Work.................................................................................... 43 3.4 Synaptic Sculpture: Vibrant Materiality and the Interconnected Body.......... 43 3.4.1 Sperm, Stars, and Human-Centric Perception.................................... 43 3.4.2 Inversion of the Design Process.......................................................... 45 3.4.3 Bridging Materiality and Information.................................................46 3.4.4 Merger of the Body and Technology................................................... 48 3.4.5 Conclusion: Synthesis and Synaptics................................................... 52 References................................................................................................................. 53

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3.1 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

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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.

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3.2 FUTURE SCENARIOS: 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? As we create more and more wearable devices, it is important that we also develop a methodology that asks designers and technologists to build future scenarios and envision how our embodied materiality is affected by emerging technologies. Wearable environments are laden with symbolic, cultural, and emotional meaning and therefore provide a unique space to investigate questions of physicality, presence, and intimacy. In many ways the wearable environment is that interface that connects, and at the same time creates a boundary with the world. Deborah Cohen in an article for The Atlantic, “Why we look the way we look now,” (Cohen, 2014) writes: Look closely at the emergence of our modern style, and you can see politics in the fabric seams. Economic collapse and the search for social unity—the conditions that made the New Deal possible—created an unlikely alignment of tastes. Streamlined clothes appealed to the still prosperous, anxious to hide their wealth, and to the downwardly mobile, who hoped to conceal their slide.

Our clothing has always expressed our relationship to social structures and to the ways we perceive others and want to be perceived by them. It also reflects ideological relationships not only to means of production—the industrial revolution after all ultimately presaged ready-to-wear and a democratization of access to fashion, but also to morality. When the zipper was introduced to male pants in 1901 critics at the time considered it a sign of moral decline. Similarly, corsets, high heels, and casual Fridays all exemplify our collective attitude toward capability, physicality, and the way we engage with the world and others. Today, as we are developing a new range of wearable devices it would be instructive to use a framework that explores design and its implications to the relationship of the self to the self and to social relationships. This same framework can be used to investigate how technologies like Google Glass and Quantified Self applications inform our relationship to our self and redefine our social interactions. In the past 20 years we have seen increased development in the realm of wearable technologies. From the early MIT experiments of a cyborgian self (spearheaded by Steve Mann and Thad Starner) to today’s Google Glass and Quantified Self applications, the focus has been on a singular vision of what it means to be human.

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Part ­science fiction, part optimized efficiency, these visions tend to a reductionism of what creates meaning, understanding, awareness, and being in the world. Countered to this approach, designers experiment with fashion’s potential for self-expression resulting in a series of projects that has focused on the use of light, experimentation with textile technologies, and refocusing notions of connectivity and intimacy. While these experimentations look more critically into the potential uses of technology as an agent of expression and of investigating the interactional possibilities of the wearable environment, they mostly focus on aesthetic potentialities and no rigorous design methodology has emerged that can be applied to the development of future devices. As our uses of technology and the devices that surround us are now a defining part of our material culture, we need to critically consider what we want our culture to evolve toward and the ways in which these technologies will mediate the space between ourselves, others, and with our increasingly complex environments. The potential of technology to create new materialities has been eclipsed by virtuality, a causal (and casual) relationship to self and others, and a mostly materialistic and reductionistic relationship to data and their meaning. Critical design and even ethics have an important role to play in reframing our uses of technology and in developing a methodology for design and the building of tangible, wearable devices and interfaces. Considering foundational questions of ethics and human capabilities as well as looking at definitions of usefulness and its relationship to design, and a design methodology centered around explorations of physicality, mindfulness and notions of sociability can help us ensure more thoughtful and useful applications. Central to the discourse of ethics are questions of capability, responsibility, and our ­relationship to the social. More fundamentally, ethics asks us to consider what is a life worth living and how we create meaning for ourselves. Can these questions be incorporated in a design and product development practice? In many ways they are already tacitly, inevitably, incorporated, but often are not specified in an articulated manner. As we build specifications matrixes we can include these fundamental questions to expand the horizon of what wearable devices can offer and how they create meaningful experiences. What are the responsibilities of designers and technologists when dealing with the intersecting nodes and dwellings of existence? What are the future worlds we want to build and inhabit? Why are physicality and tangibility important and what has design offered in the thinking of our relationship with ourselves, others, and the world at large? By framing a discourse within experimentation with physical and computational materials we can overcome the duality and reductionism that has informed most of the current and future vision of technology and technological devices. By starting with human-to-human interaction, we can ground human-to-computer interaction on principles of sustainability, physicality, and humanism.

3.2.1  Garment as Anchor As part of this process we should remember that wearables should first and foremost be wearable. They become an extension of the human body and using the

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conventions and techniques used in garments and accessories; approaching them through the spectrum of the human body should be our starting point. Our relationship to materials, clothing and how it has evolved to fashion spans thousands of years and we must take cues and inspiration from the process of making garments and the rituals of donning clothes.

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3.2.2 Start with Value A recent paper from Endeavour Partners found that “one-third of American consumers who have owned a wearable product stopped using it within six months. What’s more, while one in 10 American adults own some form of activity tracker, half of them no longer use it” (Endeavour, 2014). This statistic has been repeated often and calls into focus questions of value. Why is the drop-off rate so high? What is the actual and perceived value that wearable, and quantified-self applications and devices deliver? Questions of value should ground each product development and clearly articulate the value provided. Value has multiple dimensions, both external and internal, and while we are accustomed to measuring value in financial terms, it is necessary to qualify value as a network of relationships and clearly map how these relationships, interactions, and exchanges evolve over time. These relationships, in human terms, almost always include our relationship to our self (self-reflection), to those close and near to us (our intimate relationships and to the social at large), and to our relationship with the world (our urban and natural environment).

3.2.3 Think about the System In other words, value and the way we formulate relationships are part of a larger ­system of interactions. Adopting a view of the system of interactions and mapping the nodes and points where devices and their features connect to various touchpoints in the system will provide designers and technologists with insights for richer interactions and help find opportunities for innovation and adoptability. How do ­proposed functions and features extend possibility, serendipity, discovery, and sociability? What are the intersecting areas of activity and interest that emerge? By analyzing current infrastructures and mapping the cultural, physical, social, and institutional components of a system, we might be able to better understand the interactions that create, support, and challenge current systems. Working with users to identify the leverage points for change and growth and to reimagine systems that enable better flows of value consistently results in designs that allow users to imagine their own uses—therefore overcoming barriers to adoptability.

3.2.4 Requirements and Specifications Are for Humans Too Too often requirements and specifications account for the needs of the device and not the needs of the user. There is tremendous opportunity in developing requirements and specifications that articulate the value for users and how this value is created and touches their entire system of use and interactions. Google Glass, a little over a

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year after it released a version of the device to developers, published a set of social guidelines, a social etiquette of sorts. The list includes advice such as: Ask for permission. Standing alone in the corner of a room staring at people while recording them through Glass is not going to win you any friends.

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Glass-out. Glass was built for short bursts of information and interactions that allow you to quickly get back to doing the other things you love. If you find yourself staring off into the prism for long periods of time you’re probably looking pretty weird to the people around you. So don’t read War and Peace on Glass. Things like that are better done on bigger screens. Be creepy or rude (aka, a Glasshole). Respect others and if they have questions about Glass don’t get snappy. Be polite and explain what Glass does and remember, a quick demo can go a long way. In places where cell phone cameras aren’t allowed, the same rules will apply to Glass. If you’re asked to turn your phone off, turn Glass off as well. Breaking the rules or being rude will not get businesses excited about Glass and will ruin it for other Explorers.

Google Glass, by releasing its product at an early stage, has been able to generate a vigorous discourse on privacy, socialization, and the way social cues can be built into interaction design. Could Google Glasses be designed in such a way as to make the list of do’s and don’ts obsolete? Experimenting with scenarios of use and observing users in the street, cafes, parties, and at work can yield insightful observations that can be translated into design decisions and reflected in specifications and requirements.

3.2.5 Prototypes and Iterative Design In many ways Google Glass is a widely released early prototype. It will be interesting to see how the insights gathered from this initial release can be used to experiment with social cues and overcome some of the backlash that it has attracted as a product so far. While the importance of early prototypes and iterative design is well understood and embraced as part of a design methodology, additional emphasis must be placed when developing wearable devices. The relationship we have with our clothes and accessories touches deeply our sense of self, comfort, identity, and expression. Creating early prototypes that imagine how wearable devices conform to the body and its rituals reveals opportunities for value and avoids the ergonomic and social pitfalls that many wearable devices in the market have fallen into.

3.2.6 Experimenting with the Future, Questioning the Present Imagining the future and engaging in speculative design can help designers and technologists explore edge-case scenarios and draw out the possible implications of design and technology decisions. The future is often an exaggeration of the present, and speculative design can be used to highlight the ramifications of design decisions, features, and functionality considerations and reveal the potential value and context of use for current devices.

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3.2.7 Coloring

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Coloring is a hypothetical consumer health product that is launched in the year 2046 and was developed by School of Visual Arts, MFA Interaction Design (SVA NYC, 2014) students Matt Brigante, Melody Quintana, Sam Wander, and Amy Wu as part of a Future Wearables class. The project assumes that by the year 2046 significant leaps in psychology and neuroscience research will have taken place, transforming our understanding of mental health. The project also assumes that innovations in materials technology will introduce new possibilities for treatment, such as brain chip implants. Coloring is imagined as a skin interface for people who use brain chip implants to track and manage their mental health. It communicates with the user’s brain chip to display a real-time ­visualization of their emotional state, right in the palm of their hand. Emotions are mapped to a 7000-color spectrum. The spectrum is richer and more precise than our verbal emotional vocabulary, empowering people with a new language to understand their feelings. Rather than having to use blunt and unpredictable prescription drugs, users are given the agency to self-medicate when appropriate. They can simply blend harmonizing colors into their Coloring to balance their mood Coloring (2014)

The project took as a starting point the work of John Rogers, professor of ­materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in implantable technologies and speculated on future scenarios of use. At the same time it asks us to consider how our wearable devices can provide us with a new vocabulary and range for expression and communication. This future scenario can help explore current opportunities and create a framework for inquiry and extend what is possible (Figure 3.1).

3.2.8 Life As We Know It—The Qualified Self Another student project, developed at NYU’s (ITP, 2014) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program looks critically at the uses of quantified-self applications and devices. “Life As We Know It—The Qualified Self” is Asli Aydin’s graduate thesis. Aydin, fascinated by the quantified self movement decided to use a series of life-logging techniques to track herself through a very difficult time in her life following her father’s cancer diagnosis and through his death. The project asks questions such as the following: “Why do we collect data? Do data tell us something we don’t know about ourselves? Does it change our behavior?” Aydin set out to discover whether or not her data could tell the story of her experience. She writes: “The more I tried to put it together, the less I felt like it connected to my experience. I decided to create a book that compared the two states of my data during the process of death and how I felt.” Aysin used the following applications and devices to life-log her experience: Jawbone, Openpaths, Reporter, Moodscope, Happiness Survey. After months of intense self-quantification Aysin concluded that the qualified self is far from the quantified and she realized that her journal entries

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Color emotion spectrum

7000 colors

Hierarchical structure enables simple, top-level readings without referencing a chart. More fine-tuned readings can be gleaned with the help of an interactive map.

Happiness Surprise Disgust Anger Contempt Fear Sad

7 Families Discrete Emotion Theory These seven specific core emotions are biologically determined emotional responses whose expression and recognition is fundamentally the same for all individuals regardless of ethnic or cultural differences.

1000 colors in each core emotional “family”

FIGURE 3.1  Coloring by Matt Brigante, Melody Quintana, Sam Wander, and Amy Wu.

provided the insight and reflection that eluded her devices and applications. At the end of her thesis presentation she writes: Every time we experience these moments the self is shaped. They shape our expectations, our confidence, our expression. They shape who we are. The truth is simple and it is not embedded in a set of data that tells me how many steps I’ve taken. While data can be useful with specific set goals, my biggest takeaway throughout this journey has been to remember to track my soul first. The self is fascinating - that fascination cannot be quantified…

Her experience and reflections can be used as direct input and create guidelines for developing wearable devices that aim to change behavior and provide insight into the human experience.

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Thich Nhat Hanh is a Buddhist monk who was invited by Google (Confino, 2013) to give a series of workshops and provide inspiration to its developers and product managers on how to engage users and develop applications and devices that can yield the insights that evaded those devices and applications that Aydin used and possibly account for the drop-off rate of current wearables. In discussing the goals of these workshops, Thich Nhat Hanh commented:

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When they create electronic devices, they can reflect on whether that new product will take people away from themselves, their family, and nature. Instead they can create the kind of devices and software that can help them to go back to themselves, to take care of their feelings. By doing that, they will feel good because they’re doing something good for society.

Engaging with the totality of human experience and probing into what creates value, the systems that we inhabit and the relationships that we create in them are all fundamental in the creation of meaningful and useful wearable devices. We have adopted a far too reductionistic approach for too long and have been leading product development based on a mechanistic model of what it is to be human. Comfort, connectedness, engagement, the delight of a soft material against the human skin, the rituals of dressing and undressing, form the grounding framework for creating wearable devices. We stand at the precipice of incredible innovation in materials, sensors, computational and power technologies. We have the opportunity to create new models of expression, communication, and reflection, and in order to do so, we should adopt a methodology that is grounded in humanistic and ethical principles and critically consider how we want to use these innovations to interact with our communities and ourselves.

3.3 SELF AND THE SOCIAL POLITIC OF WEARABLE TECHNOLOGIES 3.3.1 Personal Technologies, Regional Innovation Wearable computing devices are personal, particular, and corporeal. They offer intimate understandings of the body—its rhythms, its movements, and its biochemical impulses. They offer intimacies across larger systems, networks, and communities—see, for example, the Betwine wristband (Imlab, 2014) which allows distal users to gently nudge and race against each other. Yet these devices are not the bespoke ornamentations or cumbersome user-designed apparatus of previous decades (Mann, 1997), the modern wave of wearables have moved from clunky early adopter prototypes and spread out into mainstream markets. They are FuelBand, FitBit, Glass; they are mass-produced; they are legion. To consider the ethics of this current generation of wearables—intimate, yet manifold—involves bringing together the bodies on which they sit, to the bodies that produce them. Which systems of production are employed to bring wearable technologies to mass markets? Where does control lie across these networks? By considering the sites of production and supply, we can interrogate how these systems shape the meaning of wearables,

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both in the materiality of their design, the configuration of their intended use, and the politics of the data that they gather. Market researchers predict that wearable computing devices will explode in popularity in coming years to the extent that they will become the norm (ABI, 2010). The numbers are enormous: by 2018, there are expected to be 485 million annual device shipments, all of which have to be manufactured somewhere. Despite rhetoric of a shrinking world, regional patterns of innovation and industry remain embedded into the earth; certain places are better at doing some things than others (Howells, 1999). The San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California is home to the Silicon Valley information technology cluster (Saxenian, 1996): after an early history around microprocessors and semiconductors, the area transformed into a hub for software and Internet service companies and plays host to some of the world’s largest technology companies. Many of these firms, including Google and Facebook, are now edging into the wearables market, pulling together teams of designers and engineers to haul together the concept and intent around these devices. Seventeen time zones away, the intent becomes material. China is one of the largest and most rapidly developing economies in the world, expanding the industrial capacity of its high tech industries to act as the global economy’s world factory, answering Western desire for ICT consumer goods (Bound et al., 2013). Many of the current generations of wearables are designed by people in the global North and made by people in the global South. FitBit is the market leader in the wearable activity band market. While the founder company is based in San Francisco, FitBit locates its manufacturing in China; while the device retails for around U.S. $100, it costs less than one-fifth of that to make (Electronica, 2013). Yet these devices are also designed for users in the global North, with estimates that 61% of the wearable technology market in 2013 was attributed to sports and activity trackers. FitBit was, its founder explained, designed as a quiet and personal device: From early on we promoted a notion of a more introverted technology that is more about the connection between yourself and your goal, rather than having a third party like an athletics company telling you how fit you should be and what’s the proper weight for you. Amit, G. (2014)

In doing so, the technology falls into not only Western trends around commercialized self-improvement (Maguire, 2008) but also trajectories laid down by the earlier quantimetric self-tracking movement.

3.3.2 Quantifying the Intended User Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved. So we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves. We welcome tools that help us see and understand bodies and minds so that we can figure out what humans are here for. Kelley (2007)

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The term quantified self emerged in 2007 to describe the way that people—­initially an elite group of Bay Area inhabitees, including editors of WIRED ­magazine— sought to find answers to cosmic questions (“Who are we? What does it mean to be human?”) through rational corporeal self-knowledge, giving rise to tools that offered insight into the data found within their own bodies. By this framing, wearables became a way of reducing wider physical—and mental—healthcare systems of infrastructure down to the level of the individual: self-tracking as a form of self-care, reconfiguring the relationship that might otherwise be formed between a patient and a medical professional to that between a user, a piece of rubber, a circuit board, and a software algorithm (while, in the wings, a company sits quietly, waiting to mop the data up). Research done by the Centre for Creative and Social Technology (CAST) at Goldsmiths, University of London, found that 63% of U.K. and 71% of U.S. respondents thought that wearable technology had improved their health and fitness, with one in three willing to wear a monitor that shared personal data with a healthcare provider (Rackspace, 2013). The business models around the market indicated where the true value of wearables lies: not in the plastic and electronics of the hardware devices themselves but also in the fog of data that they extracted from the human body. As Chris Bauer, the codirector of CAST, described it: The rich data created by wearable tech will drive the ‘human cloud’ of personal data… With this comes countless opportunities to tap into this data; whether it’s connecting with third parties to provide more tailored and personalized services or working closer with healthcare institutions to get a better understanding of their patients. We are already seeing wearable technology being used in the private sector with health insurance firms encouraging members to use wearable fitness devices to earn rewards for maintaining a healthier lifestyle. Bauer (2013)

While the devices themselves are manufactured in their millions, numerous software apps have also crawled into the world to make sense of this data: see, for example, the MapMyFitness tool—compatible with devices such as the FitBit and Jawbone, it has, as of May 2014, 16 million registered users who log over 200,000 health and fitness activities daily. For the users of wearable tech in the global North, ethical issues have emerged around privacy—the tipping point between sousveillance and surveillance. Participants in CAST’s research cited privacy concerns as the main barrier to adoption. Questions have been raised about whether data can be sold on to third parties; whether it is securely stored; and who, ultimately, owns it (Ng, 2014). These suspicions emerge from the primacy of the idea of control and choice: that the users who make the choice to use wearable tech as a way to figure out what humans are here for may unknowingly and unwittingly relinquish control of the data it generates; that someone else may be using rational means to see and understand bodies and minds. These are the fears of the intended user, the perfect persona who chooses to explore self-knowledge through the body, and who has the leisure time to engage in fitness activities. Control, consent, and choice are keys: over half of CAST’s respondents felt that wearable technology

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helped them feel more in control of their lives. Down across the supply chain, however, choice is abstracted and bodies are intended to be surveilled.

3.3.3 Tracking in the Factories We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves. We don’t think for ourselves, maybe they don’t trust us to think for ourselves as human beings.

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Adam Littler, Amazon picker (Littler, 2013)

The notion of the quantified self derives from a core concept of agency and sousveillance, in which the motions of the body are willingly recorded by a participant in the body’s activity. Yet there is a much longer heritage of using rational metrics to measure the activity of the human body, only by outside agents. In his work published in 1911, The Principles of Scientific Management, Frederick Taylor described how the productivity of the workforce could be improved by applying the scientific method to labor management. These included techniques such as time-and-motion studies, in which a worker’s series of motions around various tasks—bricklaying, moving pig iron, were timed to ensure the most efficient way to perform a job. Here, monitoring is not an autonomous choice made with agency about enlightenment and self-knowledge, but an act placed onto individuals within the power dimensions of the workplace itself. The body is quantified—not for self-directed self-­improvement, but as a means to wring maximum physical efficiency out of it for an outside body: the boss. The British supermarket chain Tesco equipped its employees with data bands— and determined that it thus needed 18% less of those same ­workers (Wilson, 2013). Wearables in the workplace are becoming more prevalent: CAST reported that 18% of employees now wear some kind of device, and that 6% of employers provide a wearable device for their workers. Innovations in this space include Hitachi’s Business Microscope, a lanyard packed with sensors that recognize face, body and rhythm data between employees, gathering data that can be turned into interaction-based organizational and network diagrams. A host of software solutions supports this surveillance of workplace bodies, such as Cogiscan’s “Tracking and Route Control,” which uses real-time information to track the physical location and quantities of all products on the factory floor, and in doing so “minimises unnecessary movements of employees” (Cogiscan, 2014). As Ana Coote notes, we live in an era of instant communication and mobile technologies with global reach, where people can increasingly work anywhere; and “there is no end to what employers can demand” (Coote et al., 2014). Yet unlimited work does not necessarily map onto quantified labor—indeed, it is possibly its antithesis. Unsurprisingly, the bodies at work that are the most quantifiable are those engaged in routine manual labor—not the creative knowledge-intensive work done in the designing and prototyping of wearables by engineers and designers, but repetitive replicable tasks that are only an inch away from being replaced by the automated machines who can mimic the actions of human bodies, but without need for sleep, fuel, or rights (Frey and Osborne, 2013). Adam Littler’s quote, given earlier, was taken from a BBC documentary in the enormous warehouses of the online retailer, Amazon, which stock a range of consumer activity trackers including FitBit, Jawbone, and Polar. Little, an undercover

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reporter, took a job as a picker in the warehouse in Swansea, Wales, where he collected orders from around the 800,000 ft2 of storage. To assist him—to track him—he was given a handset that told him what to collect but that also timed his motions, counting down the set number of seconds that he had to find and pick each item; and, if he made a mistake, the scanner beeped. The handsets were introduced by Amazon to provide analysis of their inventory, but also “increase worker produc­tivity by reducing the time it takes pickers to find products in a vast distribution center” (Master, 2012). For the pickers, the scanners increase productivity by leading to the intensification of tasks, increasing the stress on their own bodies—Littler himself ended up running around the warehouse during his nightshifts, covering nearly eleven miles in a night. There is no incentive for introspective self-betterment and self-knowledge from this device; the scanner observes, it tracks, and it punishes. Workers who miss the productivity targets set down and enforced by the technologies of power (McKinlay and Starkey, 1998) face disciplinary action.

3.3.4 Bodies at Work In their piece, 75 Watt (2013), artists Cohen Van Balen collaborated with a choreographer and Chinese factory workers to create a piece which reverse engineers the values of a supply chain by creating a useless physical object; the product of the labor is the dance done by the workers as they assemble the clunky white plastic device. Seventy-five watts is the average output of energy a human expends in a day, a measure that could be tracked by sousveillance through a consumer wearable, on the path to asking questions about the meaning of human life. Yet down along the supply chain, in the factories and the warehouses, the same transformative power of digital hardware around wearable technology answers the question: the human life is capital: the bodies themselves only actions.

3.4 SYNAPTIC SCULPTURE: VIBRANT MATERIALITY AND THE INTERCONNECTED BODY As technology is rapidly evolving it is becoming invisible, embodied within the materials of everyday life. Textiles have a heritage, tradition, and cultural function that are evolving in a mash-up with science and technology, imbuing them with capacities to extend our perception of ourselves and of the world and the way we live in it. Wearables’ ability to interconnect changes our perspective and relationships with others; the ability to focus more explicitly and explore intimately at nanoscopic levels combined with macroscopic and virtual perspectives opens possibilities of completely new experiences of being in the world.

3.4.1 Sperm, Stars, and Human-Centric Perception It was once believed that human spermatozoa contained all the elements needed for human reproduction. To the human eye it appeared that a tiny figure was visible in the head of the spermatozoon. A woman’s role in reproduction was simply a vessel to

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nurse the spermatozoon until it developed enough to enter the world. The invention of the microscope revealed the process of spermatozoa fertilization with ovum and changed the role of women profoundly. Our comprehension of the world is mediated by technology and is dependent on our ability to adapt and make sense of the information the technologies provide. Early star charts depicted animals, figures, and objects in the sky. The images and mythologies that went along with them were used to aid memory and help recall the location of stars in the visible night sky. With the invention of the telescope the cartographer’s job changed drastically. Maps became factual documents plotting out the heavens above in ever increasing detail, in line with technological advancement. Human consciousness is altered as new technology enables us to see things differently, for example, when we landed on the moon in 1969, images looking back at the earth were projected into people’s living rooms via television, and they enabled us to imagine ourselves as part of a greater whole and see the earth—rather than endless and boundless in natural resources—as a delicate intertwined ecosystem of which we are just a small part. Floating eye is a wearable work by Hiroo Iwata performed at Ars Electronica in 2000 where a floating blimp suspended above the wearer’s body supports a camera. The head of the wearer is encased in a dome, and from the inside they view a panoramic screen projecting what is being filmed. The experience is that of observing oneself from above, normal vision is superseded and interaction with the environment estranged. This work predates a perspective that we are becoming accustomed to, that of navigating space by looking down into the screen of a digital device, guided by a plan view and prompted by Google maps or the like. Wearable technologies may at first seem to disorient or give a feeling of estrangement but as we explore new ways to understand the world around us, we are profoundly changing the way we live and interact. The shift in perspective that we are fast approaching involves both time and scale. The wearable technology that surrounds and permeates our bodies will mediate this experience and augment our senses. We are witnessing the emergence of a new paradigm in terms of our augmented perspective—our perception of scale expanding our awareness and sensitivity across macro and ­nanospheres that we will learn to accommodate and ultimately will become our normative environment. Since the mid-1990s we have lived in environments supported by digitization. This is long enough to evaluate the theoretical hype of the late 1990s surrounding the digital and virtual world of the Internet that hypothesized homogenization of culture and the divorce of information from materiality. The teleological and ocular-centric faith in technology has deep-seated historical roots. With the invention of photo­ graphy, journals wrote articles in awe of this new science—it seemed that we had procured the magical ability to capture moments of life in factual documents of light on photo sensitive paper. A zealous appeal made in the comments by Oliver Wendall Holmes in an article published in 1859 heralds “this greatest human triumph over earthly conditions, the divorce of form and substance. … What is to come of the stereoscope and the photograph…[]… Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mold on which form is shaped” (Holmes, 1859).

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In retrospect, the Internet has ultimately refocused our attention on matter, as the dividing line between digital and material evaporates within our human-technogenesis. The interface inherently involves a coupling between computer-mediated rendering of data and human response. Strings of 0’s and 1’s in raw state in the computer have no sensory or cognitive effect without material formations that interface with our proprioceptors to make sense of the data. The development of computing is deeply indebted to the development of materials technologies. Textiles manufacture and techniques helped conceptualize digital technologies—from the protocol logic of knitting to the matrix of heddle structures in weaving machines, to the dpi and pixilation of hand techniques such as crossstitch. Teshome Gabriel’s Notes on Weavin’ Digital: T(h)inkers at the Loom (Gabriel and Wagmister, 1997) explores traditional non-Western weaving in this light; Otto Van Busch’s Zen and the Abstract Machine of Knitting (von Busch, 2013) and Sadie Plant’s The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics (Plant, 1996) and Zero’s + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (Plant, 1997) evidence strong connection between the material and the digital.

3.4.2 Inversion of the Design Process We are witnessing a subversion of the traditional fashion design methodology away from the trickle-down theory to one that can enhance a relationship between designer and user who become coproducers, at the same time connecting materiality to anthropology and the lived experience of the individual. Self-mapping and tracking means that data that was once considered the domain of a third party specialist to interpret is available for self-reflection and immediate reconfiguration. Combined with the storage capacity of super computers massive data sets about micro personal information are guiding future strategies for big business design. The inversion of the design process from technology-driven design, to need-driven design, and ultimately to concept-driven design takes the design process from one of the enabling technologies, to applications-driven design, (that is, focusing on users, tasks, and evolution), to visionary design driven by concepts and principles. The Centre for Postnormal Policy at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies forecasts a postnormal condition of chaos, complexity, and contradictions under conditions of uncertainty and accelerated change in three future modes: the extended present, the familiar future, and the un-thought future (Sweeney, 2014). In the world of contemporary art we have witnessed a transition where the locus of meaning that once lay within the object, and then in the medium, now lies in the interface (Poissant, 2007). This holds true throughout design and fashion sectors, in other words the evolution has changed the focus from production, to service, to experience (Table 3.1). Our relationship with the world is evolving from one in which historically we were hunter gatherers using the products of the world; then we learnt to harness the energy in production of materials, “controlling the natural world” around us through industrialization; and now there is a need for us to imagine the future, to “design and craft our own world.”

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TABLE 3.1 Authors and Concepts That Point to the Growing Prominence of Experience/ Interaction/Interface Design (Including HCI) Author

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John Sweeney (2014)

Louise Poissant (2007) Jannis Angelis and Edson Pinheiro de Lima (2011) Neil Gershenfeld (2011) Ishii Hiroshi (1997, 2012) PSFK (2014)

Past

Present

Future

The extended present governed by trends and weak signals Material object Focus on production

The familiar future governed by images of the future(s) The medium Focus on service

The un-thought future governed by design and experience The interface Focus on experience

Computers controlling tools Technology-driven design Connected intimacy

Machines making machines Need-driven design

Building with materials containing codes Concept-driven design

Tailored ecosystems

Co-evolved possibilities

3.4.3 Bridging Materiality and Information In the history of wearable computing the predominant focus has been on ocular-­ centric ways of knowledge transfer (Margetts, 1994). Although augmentation of other senses is being explored, historically the emphasis has been placed on vision as the means of input and output and this legacy has informed our perception of wearables, the classic example being Google Glass. Primary research funding is still spent in this area. Challenging the dominance of vision, in an analysis of the senses David Howes cites both Marx’s doctrine and etymology when he proposes that “Late capitalism is much more than a ‘civilization of the image’ and it cannot be theorized adequately without account being taken of its increasingly multisensory materiality. The difficulty here stems from the sensory bias intrinsic to the very notion of ‘theorization’: theory comes from the Greek theorein meaning ‘to gaze upon’.” It is high time for all of the senses (not solely vision) to become “directly in their practice theoreticians” (Quotes from Marx, discussed in Howes, 2003). In order to achieve this, discourse needs to change the language around design away from functional attributes and technical capacities to develop a connoisseurship of somesthetic qualities (Schiphorst, 2011). The focus of wearable technology that concerns itself with experience views technology as the mediator rather than the end product. What we wear will record bodily data and exchange information with the environment. The line between personal and global data will blur, sensory stimulation will be felt at macro and micro spheres of human–computer engagement and interpersonal communication. What we wear not only expresses our identity, protects us, and regulates temperature but also is rapidly becoming the substrate to embed sensors, recorders, actuators, transmitters, diffusers, and integrators (Pold, 2005). These six elements expand and augment the body’s five senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Wearables utilize these 11 parameters as new media to sculpt experience.

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Sensors perceive data in the environment; they can be based on the detection of different parameters such as light, heat, humidity, stress, force, movement, and noise and come in many forms such as microphones, ultrasound detectors, photovoltaic sheets, stretch sensors, and data gloves. They can be analogue or digital. Recorders take samples of reality or traces of activity and collect them, in a­ nalogue formats by fixing them onto substrates like tape, film or photo-paper, and through numeric coding in digital formats. Recordings can be transformed and altered, and augment memory. Actuators can have different mechanisms such as electric, pneumatic, or hydraulic, in order to produce activities such as movement, light, or sound, for example, a fan, a light, or a buzzer. When combined with materials such as shape memory alloys, thermochromic inks, or smart textiles, they can appear to embody autonomy in reaction to changes in conditions. Transmitters nullify distance, as they have evolved so has the way we live in the world. This has been as profound as the effect of the lens on our visual perspective from micro to macro understandings of the world. They are interfaces ranging from the telegraph to television, facsimile, radio, Internet, X-bee, etc.; they offer potential to reconsider time, space, and interaction. Diffusers are attachments for broadening the spread of a signal into a more even and regulated flow, for example, devices that spread the light from a source evenly across a screen. They could be in the form of an electrostatic membrane or a projection screen such as LCD, plasma, or thermal imaging. Integrators involve the integration of technologies into living organisms, the mash-up between biology, medicine, tissue engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial life. Translation of data from one type of input expressed through another form of output is a natural function within the fungible realm of data; it enables exploration of the traditional boundaries that govern human perception. It is well known that people without or with minimal function of certain senses, become more acute in the function of others. For example, by producing oral clicking noises, Ben Underwood is able to echolocate and visualize spaces around him even though he is blind. Tests showed that when he performed echolocation his calcimine cortex, the part of the brain that normally deals with visuals, was shown to be stimulated (McCaffrey, 2014). Neil Harbisson is an artist who has achromatopsy, meaning he cannot see colors. He has legally registered as a cyborg and wears a permanent head mounted computer that enables him to hear color by converting light waves to sound waves. He is a painter and produces artworks based on music. His senses have been augmented and his body adapted to the expanded somesthetic so that he perceives more than the natural human visible spectrum to include infrared and ultra violet (Harbisson, 2012). The body’s sensual capacities can adapt and accommodate new experiences and wearables provide a platform for experimentation. An example is a wearable devise that explores sensory dissonance—Bamboo Whisper translates language from one wearer into percussive sounds and vibration felt by the wearer of a second device (Figure 3.2).

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FIGURE 3.2  Bamboo Whisper, Tricia Flanagan, and Raune Frankjaer. (Photo: © Tricia Flanagan, 2012.)

By exploring voice in terms of vibration, and stripping away semiotic analysis of language, the sensual capacities to communicate emotion and understanding between bodies could reveal predemic universal Ursprache. In this light, Bamboo Whisper extends earlier experiments by Dadaist Hugo Ball with his nonlexical ­phonetic poems and what the Russian futurist poets Khlebnikov and Krucënykh’s termed Zaoum (Watts, 1988). What happens when body rhythms overlay one another? Does one regulate the activity of the other? Do the bodies adapt to the exchange and find new rhythms and harmonies in unison? We experience similar effects when dancing or sleeping close together. Parents intuitively adopt techniques of rhythm, breathing or singing to nurse babies. Experimentation in wearable technology can develop and adapt similar strategies in order to generate fundamental questions and employ them in speculative design. This methodology represents an alternative to design processes that use design to answer preconceived questions generated from historical or market generated data and formulated as problems to be solved. Affirmative design practices such as the latter are limited in their capacity and do not support design mavericks. Adopting a language that enables effective design of emotional experiences and fosters a connoisseurship of the interface, for example, through the use of the eleven parameters described earlier, is an attempt to address somesthetic issues as primary to design development where the technology itself does not govern but is a tool in the design of human experience.

3.4.4 Merger of the Body and Technology PSFK predicts a future of coevolved possibilities where “technologies are evolving alongside human behaviors to augment, replicate or react to natural abilities and inputs, creating an increasingly connected relationship between people and their devices” (PSFK, 2014). The person as computer embodies new forms of intuitive computer control. Steve Mann calls this Humanistic Intelligence (Mann,

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2001, 2008). Flanagan and Vega’s research into Humanistic Intelligence produced Blinklifier, a wearable device that uses eye gestures to communicate with an onboard computer. By wearing electroplated false eyelashes and conductive eyeliner, bio-data from blinking communicates directly with the processor without engaging cognitive action. The body’s natural gestures are augmented and amplified into a head mounted light array (Flanagan and Vega, 2012). We innately understand and interpret information from people’s eye gestures; by amplifying these everyday gestures, Blinklifier leverages the expressive capacity of the body (Figure 3.3). Anticipating the merger of the body and technology, Ray Kurzweil proposed singularity (Kurzweil, 1998, 2006) as the point in the future when the capacity and calculation speeds of computers equal that of human neural activity, and our understanding of how the mind works enables us to replicate its function. Kurzweil promulgates artificial intellects superior to human ones, which poses the question: In the future will we be outsmarted by our smart-clothes? Artificial intellects known as artilects will conceivably have rights, following the attainment of universal human rights, and then the rights of animals, landscapes, and trees (Dator, 2008). Nonhuman entities are already represented in our juridical systems, in the form of corporations, and artilects could attain rights in a similar manner (Sudia, 2001). The separation between human and machine intelligence traditionally lies in the human realm of emotions thought of as metaphysical. Recent scientific discovery has given us insight into emotions such as retaliation, empathy, and love that can now be understood within the frame of scientific knowledge.

FIGURE 3.3  Blinklifier, Tricia Flanagan, and Katia Vega. (Photo: Dicky Ma. © Tricia Flanagan, 2012.)

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Lower levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin may affect your ability to keep calm when you think someone is treating you badly and promote your tendency to retaliate (Crockett, 2008). Mirror neurons have been discovered in the brain, which produce the same chemical reaction in your body when you witness an experience happening to another as are being produced by the body you are watching (Keysers, 2009). For example, when someone falls over and hurts himself or herself, you may instinctively say “ouch” and actually produce small amounts of the same chemical reaction in your body as if it happened to you. Empathy could therefore be described as physiological rather than a purely emotional condition. Biologists are endeavoring to interpret emotional states into biological chains of events. Tests indicate that higher levels of oxytocin in females and vasopressin in males may foster trust and pair bonding at a quicker rate. Brain activity in dopamine related areas of the brain are active when mothers look at photos of their offspring or people look at photographs of their lovers. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, which activates the same circuitry that drugs like nicotine, cocaine, and heroine do to produce euphoria and addition. Love therefore can be described as “an emergent property of a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides and neurotransmitters” (Young, 2009). We tend to anthropomorphize robots, our bodies produce mirror neurons in reaction to their behaviors in a similar way that we do to human entities (Gazzola et al., 2007). Can the experience of digitally mediated touch produce physiological chemistry in the recipient? Cute Circuit’s Hug Shirt senses the pressure and length of a hug, the heart rate, and skin temperature of the hugger and sends this data via Bluetooth to a recipient whose corresponding Hug Shirt actuators provide a simulated hug. Put simply, the sender hugs their own body and a recipient body feels the experience. Can wearables, designed to actuate physical haptic stimulus on another induce chemical emotional effect? What are the potential implications for health, medicine, and well-being? The interconnected networks that mirror neurons imply, between human but also nonhuman entities, pose fundamental problems to Ray Kurzweil and Norbert Wiener’s (Wiener, 1989) assumptions that by mechanistic analysis of the materials of the body, we will ultimately understand and replicate them. Quantum physics proposes that to understand the mind, we must look outside the body, and consider the interconnected nature of everything as porous. Textiles of the future merge science and technology. Nobel laureate Alex Carrel headed the first tissue culture laboratory exploring one of the most complexes of all materials— the skin. Future textiles will be designed with highly engineered specifications—like skin—combining areas that are thicker, thinner, more flexible, or ridged and that have the ability to adapt to the task or the environment. At SymbioticA lab, Aaron Catts has been growing cultured skins from enzymes to produce kill-free leather, an approach that tackles ethical and sustainability issues. Stelarc’s Ear on Arm (2006–ongoing) was cultured in the SymbioticA lab. The ear was grown from tissue culture around a frame and then sutured to Stelarc’s forearm. A microphone was then embedded in the prosthetic enabling visitors to Stelarc’s website to listen to whatever his third ear hears. In a future iteration of the project, he plans to implant a speaker into his mouth, so that people can speak to him through transmitters, for example, from his website or a mobile telephone, and he will hear the sounds inside his head, or if he opens his mouth someone else’s voice could speak from within it.

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Through the convergence of biological engineering and nanotechnology, future clothing and accessories simply could grow from our bodies. Nancy Tilbury’s speculative designs explore new definitions of designs without cloth or conventional fabrication methods (Quinn, 2013). Tilbury’s research promulgates notions of garments formed from gases and nanoelectronic particles that automatically assemble on the body, liquids that thicken when they come into contact with the body and form a second skin, and surfaces that emerge from inside the body induced by swallowable technologies in the form of tablets or nanoprobes that create changes in the color, pattern, or textural surface of the skin. The swallowable Peptomics, developed by Johannes Blank and Shaila C. Rössle, convert the alphabetic language used to identify protein code into new configurations of molecular word modeling (Blank and Rössle, 2014). Their project has recreated the seven deadly sins of wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony into new three dimensional chains of amino acid monomers linked by peptide bonds, complete with their specific biological functions, and encapsulated into word pills. Health projects of the future such as Coloring, pictured earlier in the chapter, combine with biotech approaches like Peptomics provide examples of the merger of electronic and chemical synapses to potentially create consumer mood management products that may be closer to realization than we think. From the inside out, we are capable of 3D printing organs to replace and create new body parts that will integrate with fashion and technology affecting social and political agency of the future. Tonita Abeyta’s Sensate (Lupton and Tobias, 2002) collection takes the tools of sexual hygiene and makes them into fashionable intimate apparel made from latex with built in male/female condoms. At a micro scale, the borders between inside and outside the body become permeable and fluid. Lindsay Kelley’s project Digesting Wetlands considers the space of the body as a micro biome, a wetland environment, and an interconnected ecosystem. “Digestion becomes a way of figuring the landscape and encountering animals, plants, and environmental systems, with molecular gastronomy techniques providing metaphoric and literal frameworks for imagining how bodies and landscapes interrelate” (Kelley, 2014). Kelley designs molecular gastronomy events and edible objects as forms of environmentalist interventionism. For example, to better digest oil spills or absorb heavy metals. From this approach bodies are viewed as floating islands where metaphors of atmospheric shift, drift, and blooming open up productive spaces for intervention where fauna and flora from in and outside our bodies interact with changing populations of viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Digital ecosystems can be viewed in a similar fluid manner where keywords for future design describe events like calcification, erosion, sedimentation, swarm behaviors etc. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) enables optical imaging of the world at the nanolevel. Interestingly as we have traced the changing perception of the world aided by new optical apparatus, the telescope, the microscope, and the stereoscope are all lens-based technologies. The most dramatic change in our perception is occurring as we incorporate nanoscale environments, where scanning the surface with AFM produces haptic vibrations that are translated by computer programs into visual images. One example born from this technology is a textile substrate that is self-cleaning that was developed by mimicking the cell structure of the lotus leaf.

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Macro perspectives gained through global information networks, cloud computing, and super computers that allow access to information instantaneously have enabled us to envisage an interconnected worldview. Simultaneously, an amplified awareness of the instability, fungability, and interconnectedness of things is ­emerging as we acknowledge the vibracity of the world at a molecular level. The importance of haptic engagement within communication, incorporating the body’s full potential of senses, is gaining recognition. Nanoperspectives reveal a world with completely different parameters and support a reconsideration of vitalism fundamental to string theory and quantum physics that question our current understanding of materiality. This perspective further promulgates the space of design to be in the interface as mediator of experience, rather than design of objects or products.

3.4.5 Conclusion: Synthesis and Synaptics The current way we view HCI is predominantly mediated through a screen and keyboard. Linking computing directly to the body—biology and technology goes way beyond consideration of semiotic analysis, it is not simply just a process of signs as Barthes (1973) would have it—it is a process involving all the senses. There is a need to establish a connoisseurship in the somesthetic design of wearable interfaces—be they physical or digital. Synaptic sculpture is an approach that views materials (biological or electronic) in terms of their potential as actants and bodies and things as agentic. It is a neologism “the combination of three words: haptic, synaptic and súnopsis. Haptic—of or relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch and proprioception; Synaptic—of or relating to a synapse or synapses between nerve cells. It is a specialized junction where transmission of information takes place through electronic or chemical signals, a communication device for transmitting information. The term was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century by the British neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington. Traditionally used in biology it lends itself well for use in relation to biotechnology and the hybrid spaces emerging from biological (chemical) and electronic (data flows) worlds. It is a relational space at a micro level; and Súnopsis—an ancient Greek word meaning sun—to combine or form plus ópsis to view” (Flanagan, 2011). What is described earlier is indebted to the notion of vitalism, an idea that has been around for some time and has been explored in the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, Deluze, Bergson, and Dreiesch. Across contemporary literature, theorists are describing a vivacious new landscape: the Internet of things (Ashton, 2009), a universe of bits (Poissant, 2007), vibrant matter (Bennett, 2010), tangible bits and radical atoms (Ishii et al., 2012), a postvitalist point of view (Doyle, 2003), and synaptic sculpture (Flanagan, 2011), all of which call for a transvital approach “where all matter–energy, code, viruses, air, and water are seen as relevant and related” (Thomas, 2013). Materials and thinking are recombining and agency is paramount in our understanding of both human and nonhuman entities. Traditional consumer-based capital structures are undermined from the bottom up (Howes, 2005) by digital ecology layering like calcification, where buildup accumulates and changes the environment.

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Bio-data and big-data combine to produce unprecedented detail of personal information enabling the tailoring of design to personal desires, while at the other end of the spectrum, human life is subsumed as a widget in the production line. Lines of control, borders between public and private, are all to be renegotiated. If you can print your own IUD, you take control away from legislation in terms of birth control or make DIY medical decisions because you have access to specific data sets that in the past were left to teams of experts—the questions who will control society and how governance systems will function in these new terrains remain unanswered. A humanistic intelligence approach to wearable technologies considers a seamless integration, extending the reach of the systems of the body into body coverings and into the world beyond. The biosphere and the data-sphere become one through which sustainable design solutions will emerge. The field of wearable technology explores the function of the mechanistic, as well as that of neural networks and mental representation. The peripheral borders where physical atoms meet digital bits are fertile new spaces for design. At the nanolevel it is revealed that everything we thought was fixed and stable is chaotic and in motion. There is a growing awareness of the porosity of the world and fungability of materials. Design of future wearable tech. apparel and artifacts are created with molecular aesthetics, they are synaptic sculptures where experience becomes a material to be molded and shaped in the design of interaction. An awareness of interconnectedness will promulgate designers to create works responsibly and tackle research problems by proposing creative solutions. Vibrant materials will be crafted into bespoke manifestations of experience—apparel as extensions of natural systems.

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