Communication Wear
In Communication-Wear Sharon Baurley 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 as well as with current cultures of mobile communications.
AHRC-Funded Research Fellowship Project 2003-2006
With the downscaling of traditional textile industry in the EU, it is envisaged that, in Europe, a high-tech clothing sector will soon emerge. First applications have already surfaced in the area of sports and health. Looking further out into the future, it may only be a matter of time before some of these wearable technologies are adopted within the fashion industry; thereby finding their way to the consumer market. Indeed, there are bold assertions that computing and communications technologies will disappear into our material environment. Although it is more likely that existing and embedded communication technologies will co-exist for decades to come, it is good to bear in mind that fashion is uniquely placed as a future mediator of technology, and may contribute to a culture where the human senses, experiences, and emotions are more and more of commercial interest. Smart materials, then, have the potential to provide a new genre of sensory experiences, which will impact both on how we experience our material culture and how we interact with it. Such intelligent materials might facilitate our interaction with them on a creative level as we seek to be ‘co-creators’, fashioning products and the experiences they bestow to correspond to our moods, aspirations and desires. 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.
Thus, 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 as well as with current cultures of mobile communications.
Communication-wear was a clothing concept that sought to augment mobile communications. It enabled expressive messages to be exchanged remotely between people, by conveying a sense/experience of touch, and presence. By embedding communications technologies together with smart textile systems into clothing, the ways in which people are able to communicate and express themselves could be enhanced. Using garment prototypes as research probes user perceptions were gauged in user trials in collaboration with HP Labs. The overall aim of these studies was to start to gain insight into the potential value of augmenting the mobile phone in this way, as well as how people might appropriate the technology in future scenarios. The probe method enables a deeper level of knowledge about user’s desires, preferences and behaviours to be uncovered, as well as to gain insight into the way the product or experience makes them feel. In the same way that youth culture makes their own meaning through their clothing and mobile communications, this research aimed to discern whether similar patterns of appropriation might arise when clothing is made active and dynamically changeable. This research marked the start of a series of design probes experiments that sought to determine what the catalysts and drivers of future consumer wearable technology that permits communication and expression might be, and by extension, the market.
The research was multi-disciplinary, drawing on expertise from fashion and textile design, electronics, wearable computing, human-computer interaction design, and psychology.
Project partners included HP Labs and Vodafone on the user study component, and Vodafone on the mobile phone SMS platform. Project collaborators included Philippa Brock (CSM) and Andrew Moore (consultant) on the design and development of textile sensors and circuits, and circuit design, and Cliff Randell, University of Bristol Computer Science Department.
