Wearable Prototypes
Frog Design put together an interesting system of wearable devices for Motorola. The School of Design is hosting a Career Days event tomorrow, and both Frog and Motorola will be there, so perhaps I’ll find out a bit more.
We’ve been exploring wearables quite a bit this year in school - I just looked at some today. My graduate studio class, taught by Jodi Forlizzi, is participating in the Design Expo (used to sponsored by Apple, now it’s Microsoft), a visionary design challenge involving a couple of grad design programs. This year’s theme is “Sharing Personal Media” - a bit vague, though plenty of room to play. Today we critiqued various concepts, one which involved wearables. I busted out foam mockups that are a little closer to the tangible interfaces paradigm than wearables. It’s still in the early stages - functionality lists and personas abound - but Jodi has us on a tight schedule, and so it’s fairly inspiring to see the collective progress.
But yeah, wearables. If you like ‘em, you should check out a great paper called Design for Wearability that was done in part by Francine Gemperle, one of the design researchers I worked with on the auditory interface design last semester. Some of the others who worked on Design for Wearability spun off a wearables company based around body-monitoring called BodyMedia, which is also worth checking out.
Frog/Motorola link from Boing Boing
erin said,
March 16, 2003 @ 1 am
sounds very cool. how was the career day? I was invited to participate in a roundtable but couldn’t travel for it due to spending money for the IA summit.
chad said,
March 16, 2003 @ 11 am
Career Days was fun. It was nice to coordinate and not worry about interviewing - some of the students got so worked up they were making me nervous. I was some amazing portfolios over the last few days, both from the grads and undergrads.
Too bad you couldn’t make it though - we had some interesting discussions in the roundtables. There was a nice mix of companies looking for interaction designers, and while several friends are likely headed off to interesting work this summer, it sounds like things are just starting to turn around in the industry. Hopefully next year will be even better.
You did miss the final days of the James Turrell exhibit at The Mattress Factory though - that alone almost makes the trip to Pittsburgh worthwhile.