[-empyre-] the Friendship Jewellery

[Kettley, Sarah]

Sure Renate, thanks for your questions -

The Friendship Jewellery was a closed network (for technical reasons at the time), although the platform it used, Speckled Computing, is intended to be open and entirely peer-to-peer, the enabling technology of Ubiquitous Computing (see www.specknet.org). There were five neckpieces in this collection, using RSSI to ‘see’ each other; once selected and worn by the five women, the colour coded identities of the pieces effectively became the identities of the individuals, with references to them in conversation and reflection consistently intermingled. The pieces themselves were deliberately ambiguous in terms of both their place in the women’s world, but my initial dichotomous questions of device or decoration? technology or craft? turned out to be very naïve, as the women themselves were very quickly able to negotiate sophisticated hybrids of these not only as static meanings, but as fluid configurations dependent on their activities and interactions.

The basic functionality of each node in the network is to identify other nearby nodes (within a range of approximately 20m in this case). The only information displayed is the identity of the other nodes found and whether they are distant (over 1m away), social (30cm – 1m away) or intimate (closer than 30cm). These distances had been arrived at through a combination of drama exercises and reflection on greeting rituals, but were found to correlate closely with Hall’s theory of proxemics (1966).  While identity and distance were reflected in the LED output of the pendants, direction was not – playing on concepts of seamfulness and the creativity of the wearer in wearable systems, this piece of information was deliberately left out so that the women would have to work with the environment to deduce the information upon which they would base social actions (approach or avoid?). By this I mean the interruptions and opportunities that certain building materials and architectural arrangements provide for connectivity and awareness of others in a space (we used the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, UK to work through two games).

Gender wasn’t an explicit topic of the work to begin with, rather I was interested in how a self professed friendship group could be seen as a distributed user. But, as they were all women of retirement age, (and to be fair, working with jewellery meant this was easier), certain questions did arise connected with how at that time (2004-2006), HCI still hadn’t managed to think much beyond the ideal individual fully functioning male body, as has been mentioned already in this discussion. Even the age group was a challenge for HCI, as until recently, there has been a tendency to treat ‘the elderly’ as a homogeneous group of over 60’s. This friendship group also demonstrated that marketing based on demographics is a hopelessly narrow approach, and that at certain life stages, we do not all choose to dress the same, or view the world in the same way, but that this does not diminish the power of our relationships, and our ability to express a collective belonging when in public spaces.

This is an incredibly important lifestage to be designing for. The women were dealing with the loss of close relatives, family politics, the care of those close to them, and other friendships dispersed across the world. Some of them held high powered jobs, some of them are artists. One of them had just published her own PhD thesis. Working with them was both a privilege and a pleasure, and very humbling. One of them was buried last week.

A full account of the project can be found in my thesis, Crafting the Wearable Computer, as well as papers documenting particular aspects of it, on my research webpage at http://www.sarahkettleydesign.co.uk/sarahkettley/research_sarah_kettley_.html.

Obviously there were many directions this work could have gone in. I pursued the theatricality of jewellery and shifted from the everyday to the gallery space, still working with the networked platform, and exploring sound (the ensemble project). See web pages for both projects at http://www.sarahkettleydesign.co.uk/sarahkettley/wearables_and_tangible_interfaces_sarah_kettley_.html.

Sarah


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