Wearable Identity?

Joanna Berzowska is the first keynote speaker, on wearable technology. An interesting term: tangible computing. Stresses the importance of actual wearability, which will likely require a certain softness to the technology.

Wearable tech might be able to provide contextual information - e.g. looking up information on the Web about people you meet when you meet them... This could be combined with snapshots of people's faces (what about legal implications?). Strong interest from the military in these devices (no surprise there) - smarter and stronger soldiers, and more sensing technology on the body (biometric and environmental sensing). Biometric sensing is also interesting to the health industry.

Much interest also in communication technology embedding (wireless antennae embroidered into garments, etc.). All of this also has significant privacy and surveillance impacts, of course - while much of this technology might be empowering for its users, it also allows others to monitor usage.

Of course little of this is science fiction any more - walking through Tallinn today the amount of personal communication devices (mobile phones, PDAs etc.) was staggering to see. We're at the liftoff stage for wearable computing, but (Berzowska asks) "what is the killer app?"

A social implication of wearable computing: fashion as a form of costuming and display of identity is put into overdrive by wearables which can change on the spot (reactive clothing) - non-emissive displays (e.g. using e-ink or thermochromic ink), soft computation, intimate technologies, memory-rich garments are required here.

Finally, we're on to memory-rich garments - realising the wave of information-gathering and hoarding which digital devices enable. Garments might be memory agents; they witness our intimate experiences; this could create physical memory; we might then be able to edit that memory, too! This goes beyond an understanding of wearable computing as a kind of technological exoskeleton.

Berzowska ends on some general questions for wearable computing: why - what do we want or need from these technologies? (She quotes Bruce Sterling from Siggraph last week: weve now moved from artefacts through machines and products to gizmos as our key objects. Gizmos exist in space-time - they are 'spimes' - and therefore are really services more than objects.)

Also, what are ecological concerns here? Wearables are difficult to recycle!