Patricia Jean Flanagan

The BIOdress: A Body-worn Interface for Environmental Embodiment

This paper discusses the development of a body-worn interface facilitating the communication between humans and their environment. It seeks to allow the wearer to understand the state of their natural environment through an extended state of embodiment. First, it discusses our motivation for sustainability and the need to change our anthropocentric attitude to a more holistic one that includes the natural environment. Then, it discusses how clothing can be seen as an immediate way of embodiment, and how computational technology and connection to the Internet of Things can contribute to the development of wearable interfaces, which expand our notion of the human body to include our natural environments. It then introduces the BIOdress, a body-worn interface facilitating interspecies communication with a goal to create an expanded network of embodiment. The overall objective is to encourage human empathy beyond the anthropocentric towards more sustainable development.

Employing Creative Practice as a Research Method in the Field of Wearable and Interactive Technologies

With the emergence of relatively accessible programmable micro-controllers, artistic use and designer application of wearable technologies have increased significantly over the last decade. This paper suggests these creations are more than a mere implementation of emerging technologies for creative practitioners to extend their artistic expression, but a method applicable within research and development. Creative practitioners generally approach their subject matter intuitively and holistically and are therefore capable of facilitating insights where rational approaches may not. Working on the periphery of computer science has the advantage of an outsider perspective, which can result in un-thought of solutions to previously unresolved problems. In this paper we discuss the merits of this approach within wearable and interactive research and describe one such procedure on the basis of a wearable device.

Blinklifier: A Case Study for Prototyping Wearable Computers in Technology and Visual Arts

The Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in 1968 [1] and the Computer in Art book in 1971[2] represent some remarkable initial approaches in collaborative art-technology projects. Over the years, projects have evolved through thinking influenced by other areas such as psychology, sociology and philosophy. Much of art theory and practice is exploratory and its outcomes may be challenging. The advent of novel materials and increasingly evolution of smaller and more affordable electronic components made it possible for anyone to make their own wearable devices. Moreover, people with different skills get together and share their knowledge to create new products. This work describes our prototyping process for developing wearable computers in multidisciplinary teams. In this paper, we present the implementation of our collaborative and iterative prototyping process in the development of Blinklifier, an art and technology project that amplifies human expressions and creates a feedback loop with the wearer.

Visceral Design: Sites of Intra-action at the Interstices of Waves and Particles

Quantum physics has undermined our traditional view of the world. Waves and particles that were once considered fundamentally opposed now can be both, depending how we look at them. This raises questions: How do we conceive the world beyond human-centric perception? How do we enrich experience and feel empathy for other entities human and non-human?

Evolutionary Wearables

Early development of Wearables emerged through professional silos of computer science and fashion design and resulted in two distinct branches typified by an aesthetic approach from fashion and by a function and ocular-centric approach from science. Attempts at collaboration between these silos tended to bring the two methodologies into conflict and often produced awkward results. Computer science is a field traditionally dominated by men and fashion design by women, so what is the future for wearables evolution as professions are becoming less gendered? In 2009 the author established the Wearables Lab in Hong Kong. In 2012 and 2014 the Wearables Lab hosted research initiatives specifically focused on haptic interfaces where wearables are viewed as an interface between the body and the world. This article maps key themes of this research leading to speculative designs for evolutionary wearables.

Critical and Speculative Wearables: Boundary Objects

The emergence of a critical and speculative design philosophy is evident across a multitude of disciplines and practices and as such is articulated through various methodologies and terminology. Wearable technology is evolving into non-traditional devises, permeating forms from data clouds to implants, breaking down traditional borders of the body, of inside and outside. Our relationship with wearable artefacts poses questions that challenge the notion of who we are and how we understand ourselves. This paper takes a humanities approach to the future-self, exploring how the role of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) mediates experience through wearables. Examples are discussed from the author’s practice as ARTographer (artist, researcher, teacher) as well as experience with skin psychology, machine assisted living and organ transplant. Wearables and smart textile prototypes created by the author’s tertiary students are analyzed as: speculative following Stuart Candy’s futurology methodology (2010); critically designed following Anthony Dunne’s approach (2006); and critically made following Matt Ratto, Sara Ann Wylie & Kirk Jalbert’s approach (2014). The article first describes and contextualizes the methodological and philosophical position of this approach, describing how it pertains to art and design practice, then elucidates potential directions for wearable HCI extending Star and Griesemer’s notion of boundary objects (1989).

The Pedagogic Prosthetic: Augmented Learning as Content-in-Motion in Hybrid Educational Spheres

This article draws on the design and implementation of three mobile learning projects introduced by Flanagan in 2011, 2012 and 2014 engaging a total of 206 participants. The latest of these projects is highlighted in this article. Two other projects provide additional examples of innovative strategies to engage mobile and cloud systems describing how electronic and mobile technology can help facilitate teaching and learning, assessment for learning and assessment as learning, and support communities of practice. The second section explains the theoretical premise supporting the implementation of technology and promulgates a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. The third section discusses mobility, both in terms of the exploration of wearable technology in the prototypes developed as a result of the projects, and the affordances of mobility within pedagogy. Finally the quantitative and qualitative methods in place to evaluate m-learning are explained.

A Vibrant Evolution: From Wearable Devices to Objects as Mediators of Experience

This article envisages objects and materials in terms of actants (entities that have the ability to modify other entities). Things are temporary assemblages of vibrant matter in emergent systems. In the context of human computer interaction, a flat ontology enables a discussion of ’counter-consciousness’ where a traditional interface ’user’ is better described as a ’co-producer’ and, further, materials and objects are crafted with an appreciation of their life beyond the conscious realm of the human perspective. Proposing tactics that engage with physical and electronic realms, this article promulgates vibrant matter as artistic media to sculpt creative experiences. We are glimpsing the periphery of a paradigm shift in our understanding of the world, in ways that are no longer static but dynamic, where change is ubiquitous but never predetermined. Wearable tangible interfaces are central to the shift that will profoundly affect the way we interact in societies of the future.