Creative Digital Interaction

This presentation will give an overview of the engineering led work being done in the field of Wearable Computing, juxtaposed with the rich work produced by artists, centered around the human body and using technology.

The emphasis will be on the shifting aesthetics of both these fields, as the first realizes the importance of product expression to commercialization, and the other grapples with the increasing invisibility and pervasiveness of technologisation.

The speaker’s own work, a series of crafted interactive jewellery, will be introduced within this broad framework. This project begins to explore positive aspects which contemporary crafts practice may bring to the design of personal digital products. ‘Hard’ functionality and expressive, or ‘soft’, functionality are treated as equal and intertwined throughout the design process, which approaches technological components as design materials in the same way that a contemporary jeweller approaches materials such as gold, resin or paper – as a necessary source of possibility and constraint.

The jewellery deliberately uses ‘ubiquitous computing’, emerging technology that will have far reaching consequences for all of us. The three pieces shown here use ProSpeckz, very small processors with sensing and wireless communication capabilities. Currently about a quarter of the size of a credit card, ProSpeckz are the first prototype of the Speckled Computing Consortium based at Edinburgh University, which aims, eventually, to produce 1mm cubed ‘specks’, groups of which will be able to organize themselves to relay sensed information from their environment.

The presenter, however, is not a computer scientist. Instead, the interdisciplinary, collaborative design process will be described from a craftsperson’s point of view, so that other non-technologists might see ways of engaging with what can otherwise be an intimidating material, and so envision new directions for their work.

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