Re: [-empyre-] clothing [and/as] technology

[Katherine Moriwaki <kaki@kakirine.com>]

Hi everyone,

Thanks to Scott for bringing up some interesting points. I had to go out 
and get the latest issue of I.D. magazine to fully respond and will 
summarize some of what was in the article to help those who haven't seen 
the publication. I'll try to respond to all the points raised, but forgive 
me if I miss some.

At 15:26 26/08/2005, Scott wrote:
> I'm a bit of a bystander on this topic, but have been tracking the
> topic for a few years now. I want to jump in and challenge you all to
> move the dialogue past a re-tread of the generic or well worn
> metaphors....For example, could you talk some about the recent issue
> of ID magazine if you've seen it? http://www.idonline.com/
> Sorry, seems the website isn't up to date, but the current issue is
> devoted to students, esp those involved with wearable tech. In short,
> I'm curious what are your thoughts about the different strategies
> described from functionally driven to more expressive pieces. What are
> the criteria, across this spectrum, for evaluating a piece's success?


The issue of I.D. Magazine that Scott is referring to is the Student Design 
review. I think what Scott was specifically referring in his post was an 
article on the Seamless student fashion show organized by Christine Liu and 
Nick Knouf at the MIT Media Lab. Seamelss - http://seamless.sigtronica.org/ 
- was held on 20th May 2005. The list of participating projects are 
available at the Seamless website.

First I'd like to address "generic" or well-worn metaphors - The work 
presented in the Seamless exhibition is great, and I am a personal fan of 
many of the participants and projects, but like most work being done today 
it does not significantly break from existing trends in wearable computing 
or fashion and technology. As Felix so aptly put in his email to the list 
fashion has historically had a relationship with technology, and clothing 
itself can be seen as a technology in of itself, extending and amplifying 
our bodies capability to self-regulate and protect itself. Additionally, 
due to their intimate contact with our bodies clothing and fashion retain 
inherent communicative capabilities. Early proponents of wearable computing 
(such as Steve Mann and the seminal work of Thorpe and Shannon) were 
visionaries. Through placing computers onto the body they were able to 
establish some very basic and influential relationships between 
telecommunications, technology, and the body that are still relevant today. 
However, with the work of Maggie Orth and soon after Elise Co, we were 
offered a reinterpretation of many of these trends which asked different 
questions of the same relationships (that of aesthetics and materiality) 
and began to introduce additional histories and lines of influence apart 
from what had previously been the realm of computer science and engineering.

Now in regards to contemporary work surrounding fashion and technology we 
see work which attempts to address the multiple histories and dialogues 
that this emerging field draws upon, and I have yet to see anything that 
has in fact taken us beyond many of the "generic" and well-worn metaphors. 
What I have seen though, is a great number of works which address those 
"old" themes with greater subtlety and nuance. I think the dreaded re-tread 
of "old" metaphors exists as a challenge for all of us working in this 
area, and yet it is precisely going back to what is "old" that will reveal 
depth in our work, rather than the relentless hunt for the "new."

To go back to the I.D. Magazine article, Scott mentioned his former student 
Alison Lewis and another Parsons MFADT  graduate Kaho Abe. (Parsons School 
of Design in New York City has a Design and Technology Program of which 
both Lewis and Abe are alumni.)


> For example, Alison Lewis was a thesis student of mine and really
> brought to my attention the redundancy of "discovery" in this field or
> as Katherine pointed out that prevailing metaphors (skin, cyborg, etc)
> might be preventing more depth of exploration. I'm very impressed by
> Kaho Abe's work for example. Kaho's thesis basically brought up this
> friction at Parsons between invention and application. Her seemingly
> simple switches and controls were brilliant and in hindsight seemingly
> obvious. The "problem" many stated while reviewing her work was, "how
> do you plan to apply these", to which I think she struggled for
> salient proposals. I say struggled, because her switches and controls
> can so easily be seen as becoming ubiquitous that any attempt to
> pinpoint or find fitness with particular applications as a way to
> defend the invention seemed irrelevant. Throughout history there are
> examples where the proposed application for a new technology was way
> off the mark and we giggle at the idea that PC's would be used
> primarily to hold recipes.


Alison Lewis' project Closer - 
http://www.alisonlewis.com/projects/Closer/index.html - is a set of two 
garments. One garment responds to hugs or touches by producing sound. The 
other garment uses a light indicator to show the number of positive touches 
(or lack thereof) in an hour. This is a lovely project on its own, but 
things get much more interesting when looking at the spectrum of recent 
wearable projects which address physical touch between people. If the 
over-arching theme is to look at alternative ways of visualizing and 
amplifying physical contact looking at how other projects have addressed 
this issue is fascinating. For example there are the Touch Memory Dresses - 
http://www.xslabs.net/touch.html and the Intimate Memory garments - 
http://www.xslabs.net/intimate.html by XS Labs which also track physical 
contact through illumination or color-changes, and Depina Papadopoulos' (of 
5050 ltd) Hug Jackets - http://www.5050ltd.com/hugJackets.html - which 
produce light and sound on contact. All of these projects share quite a bit 
in common from a technical perspective. Some sort of soft-switch using 
conductive fabrics is closed, and LED lights are lit, or sounds activated. 
In the case of the Touch Memory Dresses, two dresses use thermochromic ink 
to produce the color change using body heat as the control mechanism (just 
like the Generra Hypercolor shirts that were so popular during the 1980s.) 
From the perspective of technological "innovation" none of these projects 
provide any particularly ground-breaking solutions, but from a conceptual 
perspective they all share the same intent - to augment physical touch with 
some visual or auditory artifact and make that visible on the body, and 
each do it in a remarkably similar way.

Kaho Abe's project, Discreet Interfaces was also a great project. Using 
typical fashion notions, buttons, snaps, and tags, the project was a 
prototype control system for an mp3 player.  But I remember when talking 
with Kaho about her work that she did not know of the Philips/Levi's ICD 
project, or the Reima Smart Shout, two previous (though now rather obscure) 
projects which tackled very similar issues. And with recent research, for 
example, such the head-mounted mobile phone/mp3 player control system Thad 
Starner spoke about which required waving a set number of fingers to either 
divert a call or control an mp3 player I'm not entirely convinced that 
switches and controls embedded into our clothing will be "the" ubiquitous 
interface that succeeds for that particular application. I think asking how 
Abe planned to apply her invention is actually an extremely valid question, 
since the technological implementation, like almost all work done with 
wearables these days is actually not ready for market or any sort of 
manufacturing process. Doing the actual materials research and development 
to make Abe's controls function as they are intended is really the biggest 
challenge to people who work in this field. Most everything works as a 
prototype, but that next step, to make something truly work under 
real-world conditions is something that no one within this field has ben 
able to truly answer satisfactorily.

I see most people working within fashion and technology as trying to 
implement their ideas using whatever means currently available. As far as 
the materials science goes, that's not much. Maggie Orth was quoted in the 
I.D. Magazine article as saying it was a "black art" with no standards, and 
this is very true. Intention, and definition of the problem set is 
important too. From a very practical perspective developing low-attention 
interfaces, intelligent textile technology, or creating expressive wearable 
prototypes each have very different requirements and are yet all essential 
to this field.


> I think many wearable projects suffer because too much is trying to be
> solved to the point that we are being invited to strap on Rube
> Goldberg-like attire. If not a scope challenge, there seems to be a
> lack of audience definition or research. If not that, then maybe its a
> problem of presentation. Because there seems to be a drive for polish,
> many projects that are really just in research stages appear to be
> aimed at retail buyers. Why have fashion shows become the prevailing
> mode of presentation vs. demo days in the aisles of your nearest big
> box retailer? I guess fashion shows are sexier, but they are also for
> an elite audience. I imagine you've seen those tabloid photos of some
> unfortunate non-celeb who dared to wear a Gaultier, Galliano, McQueen
> or Kawakubo(her F/W 05 brides!!) piece. Anyway, I do enjoy fashion,
> but wonder sometimes about how it fits or supports your efforts. You
> don't see Steve Mann on the runway! ha ha. Lest I digress...

Again we need to go back to intent. Some wearables projects are genuinely 
seeking to present innovations in human computer interaction. Others are 
intended for market and general consumption as product. And, still others 
are meant as expressive explorations of form. Some of  this work is "art" 
and some manage to occupy several categories at once. I think that fashion 
shows exist as the primary way of showing this type of work because of 
historical precedence. That is how "clothing" has been officially showcased 
for quite some time, but perhaps this is just another vestigial practice 
which is holding people back. Fashion shows privilege the visual, and 
sometimes it is quite hard to grasp fashion/tech projects that do not 
change color or light up. However I do want to point out that fashion as a 
phenomena operates on a number of different levels. Though we tend to think 
of fashion shows in terms of "silly frocks" that nobody would wear in real 
life, often runway clothing is never intended for market consumption but 
exists as the stage for a designer's vision and fantasy. Garments are 
typically re-tooled and scaled back for normal buyers. Of course high 
fashion is for an elite audience. What about design shows or custom homes 
designed by famous architects - these are not accessible to the average 
person also.


> Katherine had asked Floyd I think to respond about his research
> methods/findings. It seems to me his project, while potentially
> rewarding, failed to meet its goals in large part because his intended
> audience said they'd never use it! That shocked me. Aren't people
> using the basic user-centered design process? It seems a too easy
> excuse to say it's expressive therefore audience adoption isn't an
> issue. I've seen so many projects taking on the expression over a
> distance problem (maybe it's a rite of passage?) but few seem to
> demonstrate user-centered research or ethnographic studies or anything
> that led me to believe that they had defined an audience of potential
> users who expressed such an absence over distance and concurred that a
> wearable might be able to address their desires and needs.

Just a few more related projects - F+R Hugs by Francesca Rosella and Rikako 
Sakai - http://www.cutecircuit.com/now/projects/wearables/fr-hugs , 
HoldBody  by Kelly Dobson, The Hug Pillow - 
http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9803EEDD1E3CF932A25752C1A9629C8B63 
-

which leads us into to other close yet distant communication projects such 
as the Interactive Pillows - 
http://www.tii.se/reform/projects/itextile/pillow.html - or Faraway - 
http://www.kuriosa.org/ifonly/story.html, or Mobile Feelings - 
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~christa/WORKS/CONCEPTS/MobileFeelingsIIConcept.html, 
or the IDEO Kiss Communicator, the Telesquishy - 
http://www.jtnimoy.com/itp/squishy/, or the Lumitouch - 
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/lumitouch/,

I think within here you will find a vast array of approaches, all of which 
lead to a very similar concept, and in some cases very similar 
implementation. Some of these projects use a "user centered design process" 
others very obviously don't. But I don't think that's what distinguishes 
the successful implementations from the unsuccessful ones. I have a hard 
time defining "success" with these types of projects. All of them are 
speculative. We do not have the technologies or the materials developed 
enough at this point to make most of these projects a commercial reality, 
and many of the creators of these works wouldn't consider market success 
the primary criteria for success anyway. Obviously for those that would, 
those standards should apply.

> Apologies if I've succumbed to my own concerns for redundancy and
> these questions are stale. Which leads to my last question. Is there
> are an organization or more centralized place one might go to in order
> to learn what's already been asked and addressed? If not, why not? Is
> it because this discipline is melding into others like game designers
> and theatre are merging (http://www.machinima.org/)? Or the opposite,
> it's splitting into different camps...?

Well ISWC has always been a great conference for those interested in 
Wearable Computing. But for fashion and technology - there really only 
recently seems to be a community coalescing, and this is in very early 
stages. It's hard to say right now where the communities will end up, but 
they are in flux which makes it hard to pin down.

A couple of other interesting points - The I.D. Magazine article states 
that the previous MIT fashion show, called Beauty and the Bits - 
http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/lizzy/out-in-the-world/beauty/intro.html 
- didn't have working prototypes, but when I chatted with Thad Starner 
during our meeting for the Siggraph 2005 Special Session on Extreme Fashion 
he told me that a good number of the projects in that first initial fashion 
show really did work.

The student fashion show was titled "Seamless" and yet within computer 
science some (Chalmers et al) have begun to promote the idea of 'Seamful' 
design http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~matthew/papers/Eurowearable2003Draft5.pdf 
- as an alternative to the hype surrounding "seamlessness" in technology. 
The linked paper was presented at Eurowearable 2003, a newer conference on 
wearable computing (with some fashion thrown in.) I think 'Seamful' design 
presents a compelling concept which breaks away from some of the more 
reductive interpretations of "old" metaphors, and might serve as an example 
of how we might begin to mine this area for more depth. It is helpful 
perhaps to remember that wearable computing, while presenting its own 
challenges, easily exists within the vision laid out for ubiquitous 
computing, and that when we talk about clothing as a "digital interface" we 
also then speak of a world full of embedded computing capability where all 
everyday objects might be a "digital interface" too.

So, like many a cultural studies theorist and sociologist have pointed out, 
as our habits of everyday dress and the signification we attach to what 
covers our bodies is related to the greater sets of cultural practices we 
value, in the computing world the terms and concepts we use to discuss 
fashion and technology are related to the larger currents of technology 
discourse and discovery. Quite plainly, this emphasis on the "new" is a 
flaw we see in technology discourse, and critical thinking regarding 
technology and its history is probably where we must start to get around 
the dreaded re-tread...

Anyhow, hope I've managed to at least address some of the points brought up.

Best,
Katherine