A practice-led inquiry into the nature of digital jewellery: craft explorations and dialogical engagement with people

In the widely explored area of wearable technology research, the theoretical work on digital jewellery has been largely done outside the art and craft context. Taking a jewellery perspective, this research focus on atypical personal interactions with digital technology in order to address questions associated with digital devices and potentially open up our expectations of the digital as a material within jewellery practice. Principally this thesis investigates he question “How can we design digital jewellery that are highly experiential and personally meaningful to the wearer?” This thesis addresses the need for jewellers to assert their relevance in the current debates around digital culture and the meaning associated with wearing digital devices. This practice-led research project investigates the role of digital jewellery to support self in transition in order to progress these debates. For this research, I created research methods to support participatory engagements. Following the values of experience-centred design, I designed exemplars of digital jewellery. Microcosmos, Topoi, Travelling with the Sea and Togetherness: Anthos and Chronos Brooches are examples of digital jewellery that have resulted from this research. These concepts were inspired by the lives of three participants and myself who frequently travel back to our native countries but who live permanently in the UK and who experience feelings of being in-between. Within the participatory engagements, novel design methods have been created for this particular research context. The method of Staged Atmosphere introduces the performative aspects of design probes in the context of a plane and the method of Dialogical Sketching offers a sensitive way to explore aspects of self in non-descriptive and imaginative ways with participants. These methods practised in this research contribute to design by enriching the role of creative practice to offer highly dialogical and sensitive to the research methodologies. My approach to designing digital jewellery has resulted in the development of a framework for understanding and conceptualising digital jewellery. The framework discusses the poetic qualities of the jewellery pieces by unfolding the narratives associated with their form, function and interaction. The framework contributes to discussions around how jewellery practices and digital technologies can suggest experientially rich interactions for people

Why Should Jewellers Care About The “Digital” ?

The widespread development of technological components that could be miniaturised and worn on the body has opened new possibilities for jewellers to explore the intersection of jewellery practices and the capabilities of digital technologies. Increasingly jewellery can play a role in valuing the body, understanding, amplifying and highlighting the body. However, this area remains under-explored within the contemporary jewellery practice. This paper provides a critical review of digital jewellery practice from a jeweller’s perspective and offers the grounding for a framework for understanding digital jewellery that reveals its potential within people’s lives. The research seeks to explore the more poetic qualities of interaction with digital technologies that can enrich intimacy with other people, places and ultimately the self. For clarity, digital jewellery refers to jewellery objects which contain electronic components. Similar terms are in use by practitioners across disciplines, such as smart jewellery, computational jewellery, tech jewellery and the interpretation of the terms may vary from one discipline to the other. I have chosen the term digital jewellery, not as a limitation, but as a starting point of the discussion around the potential role of digital worn objects in our lives

Art Digital Jewellery: Practitioners’ Perspectives

We introduce the term ’Art Digital Jewellery’ as a label for craftoriented, bespoke approaches to embedding electronics in jewellery. These unconventional digital-physical jewellery practices struggle for attention compared with higher profile, often more massproduction oriented wearables. This is partly because discourses articulating and critiquing these experimental practices are scarce and obscure to HCI researchers. To address this, we describe how these artistic practices arose from earlier fashion movements and we engaged six leading creative practitioners in a structured and iterative dialogue. Analysis of our adapted Delphi survey suggests that core to Art Digital Jewellery is very individualised design processes and creating artefacts which are highly personal in terms of their form, their materials, their narratives and their interactivity. An appreciation of these unique practices may enrich perspectives on designing wearables, marr

The kraftwork and the knittstruments

This paper presents a novel example of technological augmentation of a craft practice. By translating the skilled, embodied knowledge of knitting practice into the language of sound, our study explores how audio augmentation of routinized motion patterns affects an individual's awareness of her bodily movements and alters conventional practice. Four different instruments (The Knittstruments: The ThereKnitt, The KnittHat, The Knittomic, and The KraftWork) were designed and tested in four different locations. This research entails cycles of data collection and analysis based on the action and grounded theory methods of noting, coding and memoing. Analysis of the data collected suggests substantial alterations in the knitters performance due to audio feedback at both an individual and group level and improvisation in the process of making. We argue that the usage of Knittstruments can have relevant consequences in the fields of interface design, wearable computing or artistic and musical creation in general and hope to provide a new inspiring venue for designers, artists and knitters to explore

Design research to support ongoingness

This article details the development of a live design research project working with people who are bereaved, people who are living with dementia and people who are approaching end of life. The project aims to support people to continue bonds with others in anticipation of and following death. It centres on the idea of ongoingness and using art, design and digital technologies in gentle, personally meaningful ways