Wearable ISEA Panel

After lunch, we've now moved on to the second ISEA panel on wearable technologies. Some interesting discussions over lunch, too - someone pointed out that interestingly no-one mentioned nanotechnology at all! I'm also wondering to what extent wearable technology will be accessories (in a fashion sense - wristbands, necklaces, etc.) rather than garments themselves.

Katherine Moriwaki is now talking about her project Recoil which embedded strong magnets in clothes so that the garments would snap to metallic objects and others' clothes (with magnets themselves) as they walk past them. Interesting to see that this is a common theme to both presentations so far: clothes that act autonomously, without the wearer's involvement (also in reaction to body heat changes and other environmental factors, for example)... She's on to ad-hoc mobile networking (or more precisely, "a multi-hop dynamic routing ad-hoc network") now. This is very interesting: people wearing these devices essentially become mobile nodes in the network. Also of interest is how people might use, adapt their movements to, or even try to cheat the network parameters. Her umbrella.net (with Jonah Brucker-Cohen) project also adds a visual footprint for the network since the umbrellas which are the WiFi devices change colour according to their network activity. We're now on to Susan Ryan speaking about the genderedness of wearable technology - from fetishistic depictions of female cyborgs to deliberately asexual wearable tech garments to highly macho combat-style gear. Some interesting images of implanted wearable tech as well - here, for example, your 'enhanced' thumb would become your credit card...

Finally, G?n Mura now speaks about intelligent interfaces in wearable tech. Clothing is a means of self-expression, but a relatively static one (unless you change your clothes several times a day). Wearable technologies make clothing more configurable and flexible, creating a dynamic (rather than static) physical appearance. On the other hand, someone could create a personal style and essentially 'upload' it to all of their e-clothes - apparently this is already possible with the Nokia Medallion e-necklace to which users can upload images which are displayed on the necklace pendant. (Perhaps there's a market in this similar to mobile phone ringtones?) He's now back to environmental sensing (which other speakers have touched on already). I think some of this is very interesting - wearable tech which senses its proximity to certain environments (especially also other wearable technologies) could affect group dynamics in very interesting ways (especially also amongst groups which share characteristics but don't yet know one another as members of a group - e.g. first-year students). Mura calls this a 'new virtual public space'.