Augmenting Appearance with Wearable Technology - Open-ended Practices-oriented Design for Adornment and Identity as Routes to Adoption

Adornment, as a practice that expresses personality through appearance alterations based on clothing and other embellishments, is fundamental to all cultures. Hence, the social function of 'wearables' exemplifies a core application of technology. In the last two decades, advancements in wearable and ubiquitous computing have yielded novel forms of augmenting humans' appearance and face-to-face social interactions, ranging from smart clothing/accessories to bodily and augmented-reality-based modifications. Yet, notwithstanding its potential to drastically alter our social lives, the adoption of wearable technology has been limited to primarily health-related applications. Studies of 'social wearables' and expressive technologies have revealed barriers to adoption related to social acceptability and identity conflicts. Though recent efforts have led to guidelines and frameworks, the challenges of designing to overcome those hindrances remain. Conceptualising wearable technologies for appearance augmentation in terms of the social practice of augmented adornment, this doctoral research investigated how augmented adornment shapes social practices and identities. Utilising generative design research, it identified design guidelines that support the adoption of interactive expressive wearable technologies. Following an approach wherein the investigation and design process are centred on the practice, not the user, the work drew together ethnographic fieldwork, co-creative design, and open-ended technological interventions. The dissertation presents three case studies of employing practices-oriented design to investigate social practices of adornment in situ in Finland: an exploratory case study considering a zoomorphic accessory for eliciting social touch; an exploratory study examining opportunities for displaying personal sketches on one's clothing in urban public spaces; and an extensive investigation, conducted over a two-year span, of the striking tradition of Finnish university students wearing and adorning boiler suits. All three field studies revealed ways in which the meanings of a personal-identity-connected adornment practice form a crucial aspect of augmenting appearance, with the final study demonstrating an especially vivid interplay between embracing local traditions and standing out through individualistic adornments – the students linked their novel practices of augmented adorning to an existing digital practice, e.g. memeing. The findings exemplify an open-ended, dialogue-based perspective and a practices-oriented approach for generating further intermediate design knowledge. As a first milestone, the work presents a strong concept for design called Memetic Expression. By situating augmented adornment in context as a social practice, the results should assist designers in embedding social wearables in people's lives. The design approaches presented offer assistance in working through conflicts that might arise by merging digital practices with adornment and helping pinpoint routes to adoption

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Digi Merkki: An Interactive Clothing Patch Creation Kit for Socio-cultural Dress

The central promise of toolkits for designers is to reuse components and engage amateur stakeholders. Since the LilyPad toolkit made crafting garments more accessible, various toolkits and techniques, like iron-on textile circuits and digital embroidery, have been suggested to facilitate the co-design of wearable technology. Despite these efforts, commercial wearables are still mostly limited to health-related use cases. However, wearables are inherently social, as any clothing is part of one’s social identity. For a lasting impact, wearable designs need to address an individual’s culture and personal style. Congruently, scholars suggest that toolkits have to “better accommodate the everyday” and fit within existing clothing. As any design process has to introduce constraints due to the infinite number of possible use scenarios, we suggest tailored creation kits as an addition to open-ended toolkits. In a field study on wearing technology for social interaction, we engaged with Nordic university students and their cultural practice of wearing dashingly adorned boilersuits. We co-designed Digi Merkki, an interactive clothing patch for social interactions. The patches have a small colour screen and LEDs, can be controlled through conductive yarn, and are wirelessly connected to trade digital pictures and play LED animations based on social ties and proximity. However, Digi Merkki comes as a creation kit so that every user can assemble a personalised patch. Each kit contains the electronics patch prototype, various textiles and a battery. While participants received detailed instructions for the process, they could choose the cover fabric and design (e.g. open vs covered LEDs), three digital pictures to start with and a unique colour for the LEDs. Furthermore, the students chose the patch’s location on the body. Therefore, our creation kit used the advantages of handcrafting toolkits, i.e. personalisation and leveraging pre-existing skills. This approach contributed to integrating the patch into the students’ everyday practices. Personalisation helped students stand out through their creations, and diverse modifications based on different skillsets inspired others. Consequently, students adapted new practices with this digital form of expression and interaction. They playfully explored the boundaries of their community practices with stealing and spamming pictures and integrated their digital practice of memeing into their clothing practices. We suggest an increased research effort into creation kits based on our example of combining crafting practice and personalisation to embed wearable technology into cultural practices. Designing technology for actual everyday wear needs more knowledge about supporting processes that aim beyond openness and novelty but enable embedding into the everyday practice of wearing clothes.Non peer reviewe

Reinventing the Wheel : The Future Ripples Method for Activating Anticipatory Capacities in Innovation Teams

Global and systemic sustainability challenges increasingly require innovation teams to incorporate holistic, long-term thinking into their ideation. Since a comprehensive foresight process would prove too burdensome, faster methods are needed. The Future Ripples method was devised to meet this need through reflective practice in four consecutive workshops. It builds on the well-known Futures Wheel foresight method, which offers a collaborative process for brainstorming consequences and impacts. Additionally, the new approach encompasses scanning for weak signals and trends while catering to innovation teams. Analysis of the workshop activities and outcomes suggests that the Future Ripples method can nurture the anticipation skills of innovation teams and help them develop diverse, novel, yet plausible futures. The paper also discusses the role of reflection, metaphors, and the balance between critical and creative thinking in developing holistic futures.Peer reviewe

Adorned in Memes: Exploring the Adoption of Social Wearables in Nordic Student Culture

Social wearables promise to augment and enhance social interactions. However, despite two decades of HCI research on wearables, we are yet to see widespread adoption of social wearables into everyday life. More in-situ investigations into the social dynamics and cultural practices afforded by wearing interactive technology are needed to understand the drivers and barriers to adoption. To this end, we study social wearables in the context of Nordic student culture and the students’ practice of adorning boiler suits. Through a co-creation process, we designed Digi Merkki, a personalised interactive clothing patch. In a two-week elicitation diary study, we captured how 16 students adopted Digi Merkki into their social practices. We found that Digi Merkki afforded a variety of social interaction strategies, including sharing, spamming, and stealing pictures, which supported meaning-making and community-building. Based on our findings, we articulate “Memetic Expression” as a strong concept for designing social wearables.Peer reviewe

Hands-on Introduction to Futures Thinking and Foresight with the Future Ripples Method

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Owner/Author.Global and systemic sustainability challenges increasingly require innovation teams to incorporate holistic, long-term thinking in their ideation practises. However, as any full-scale foresight process would be heavy to carry out, there is a need for a more rapid method. The goal of this tutorial is to teach participants how to approach technology innovation practice with a more holistic and sustainable mindset. For this, we will introduce and use the Future Ripples method, a light-weight, participatory activity to brainstorm future consequences of signals or trends. The method aligns with the first steps of a traditional foresight process and thus aims at developing futures thinking and anticipatory capacities.Peer reviewe