Wearables: Necessity and Inevitability?
The current worldwide market is £300M, predicted to be £500M by 2005. The opportunity space for ‘smart’, ‘reactive’, ‘connected’, ‘interactive’ clothing is a broad one, covering areas such as: Healthcare and fitness; fashion; gaming, entertainment, social engagements, military engagements, space exploration, public safety, industrial safety, and business efficiency. There are many applications of smart fabrics motivated by vertical markets and extreme conditions from fire-fighters to fusiliers. Sensing danger or reducing risk in safety critical applications is an inevitable use of the technology and seems in no way controversial. This short note considers the infusion of wearable technologies into the daily lives of consumers.

Why do we need wearables?
Clothes can keep you comfortable, extend your life expectancy, help you define yourself, help you make friends, help you succeed in business, help you conform, help you rebel, help you look cool.

‘Wearables’ can do all these things and make you into a superhero, extending your senses, broadcasting your actions, speeding your awareness, invading your privacy, dimming your natural faculties, distancing your presence, complicate your existence.
The last four capabilities don’t sound much like opportunities. They are not. They are costs. Think of the calculator, the mobile phone and e-mail and you’ll understand the risks. Most people who have experienced the benefits of these everyday technologies would not be without them and live with the costs. The challenge for the industries trying to kick starting a consumer adoption of IT illuminated clothing is to lead with the positives.

Another place to put your computers or a chance to change the paradigm?
With notable exceptions that have undergone the makeover of a product designer eye, the current state of the technology communicates geek chic, a Heath Robinson fusion of technology and couture. A common perception is the silicon junkies are filling our pockets with computers just as they have filled the rest of our environment. Good for the IT industry because it will mean more ‘systems’ and networks to build and manage. Good for the fashion industry that gets to paint cat walk designs from a new palette and good for journalists and futurologist who can point to the seeds of science fiction and prophecy. But what about the customer? Will it be security, sociability, vanity or fun that drives them to put smart clothes along side calculators, mobile phones and e-mail as things they can’t live without?

Superhero, Constant care or Catwalk chic?
Carrying sensors around in the way we wear clothes enables the local context of our existence to be captured and put to good use: whether it’s helping us learn to ski by feeding back our body positions when carving a turn; or alerting us if certain bio signs are approaching critical and need action; or letting us scroll through our MP3 collection to choose the right tune for the moment. Catching context in this way extends our natural senses and interaction capabilities. If we now add to this the capabilities afforded by the networking and digital media revolutions of the last 10 years, the superhero set is complete. Not only can we extend our sensing over distance and time but also our actions. Communicating sensing data, pictures and sounds to anyone anytime, anywhere breaks the paradigm of our social interactions and may change our lives in a similar way to broadcast television, the telephone and the desktop internet. As leaf nodes at the edge of a worldwide information network where the digital Internet touches the physical world we become more than its authors. We become its eyes, its ears and its voice. This can sound like the plot of a bad B-movie or an essential part of 21st century life where our friends and family feel closer because we share more of our everyday existence or service providers such as care workers can keep us healthy less intrusively and in our own homes.

Experience model
There are many benefits rooted in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that can be delivered through something most of us wear 24x7. Survival, belonging and achievement readily spring to mind as potential roots of positive experience. In Bristol we have been exploring dimensions of experiences to understand how to deliver not just anything, anytime, anywhere but the right thing at the right time and place. Understanding local context is one route to doing this. In our work we have described three major categories of experience: Sensory, Social and Achievement. We are using these in attempt to understand where context-aware applications succeed or fail. Our research is in its infancy but with the aid of our test-bed around the centre of the city of Bristol we hope to inform and in some cases kick start the development of ecosystems around context aware experience delivery. Rooting the value of context-aware experience in human need will, we hope, increase the chance of consumer adoption of the technology. In parallel we continue to experiment with what tomorrow’s state of the art will enable. It is more geek than chic but hope it will inspire those with a more experience design eye and vision for the aesthetic.