Panel Statement

Panel:  Borders and interfaces: the challenges of the wearable computer’s design in the near future

The processes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween man and ma­chine and man-ma­chine-man gain other con­tours from the ad­vances of the mo­bile net­works. These pos­si­bil­i­ties ex­pand as we add them to the bio­met­ric tech­nolo­gies that map the phys­i­o­log­i­cal data from the users and allow com­bin­ing them with more dif­fer­en­ti­ated out­puts of their choice. This con­di­tion pro­vides the de­sign of in­ter­ac­tions be­tween users and be­tween users and com­put­ers that match the body and emo­tional state of in­di­vid­u­als in­volved and, thus, to con­fig­ure in­creas­ingly af­fec­tion­ate re­la­tion­ships based on these or­ganic ex­changes of in­for­ma­tion. In this con­text, we are going pre­sent­ing and dis­cussing sev­eral pro­pos­als from artists and de­sign­ers com­mit­ted to the cre­ation and de­vel­op­ment of bio-wear­able de­vices ap­plied to the fields of knowl­edge and per­for­mance of fash­ion, games, art and de­sign. Among them we may men­tion a few: “Con­duc­tor’s Jacket”, cre­ated by re­searchers at the Af­fec­tive Com­put­ing Group at MIT, which in­ter­prets the phys­i­o­log­i­cal sig­nals and ges­tures of the user ap­ply­ing them in a mu­si­cal con­text; “Smart Sec­ond Skin Dress”, pro­posed by Jenny Tillot­son, it con­sists of a in­ter­ac­tive dress that re­al­izes the user’s mood and starts to flow vent odors, al­low­ing the in­ter­ac­tor to cre­ate your own ol­fac­tory en­vi­ron­ment; “Bio­BodyGame” and “Neu­ro­BodyGame”, cre­ated by Rachel Zuanon and Ger­aldo Lima, they con­sist in two wear­able com­put­ers that pro­vide in­ter­ac­tions with games from the neu­ro­phys­i­o­log­i­cal sig­nals and brain sig­nals from the users, re­spec­tively, and they pre­sent the emo­tional state of the in­ter­ac­tor at the color and vi­bra­tions changes of their phys­i­cal struc­ture.

• Rachel Zuanon is media artist and de­signer. She is a re­searcher and pro­fes­sor in the MA De­sign Pro­gram at the An­hembi Mo­rumbi Uni­ver­sity. She co­or­di­nates the CNPq re­search group “De­sign: cre­ation, lan­guage and tech­nol­ogy” and the study group “De­sign of Phys­i­cal-Dig­i­tal In­ter­faces”. She holds a PhD in Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Semi­otics (PUC-SP).  She is a part­ner-di­rec­tor of the Zuan­non In­te­grated So­lu­tions in De­sign, In­ter­ac­tiv­ity and Tech­nol­ogy, a com­pany fo­cused in de­vel­op­ment of pro­jects and in­ter­ac­tive so­lu­tions for phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal en­vi­ron­ments. She has pre­sented her re­search in a va­ri­ety of places, such as: M-Con­nect 2010; ISEA2008 and ISEA2002; Con­scious­ness Re­framed 2008 and 2004, among oth­ers.

See paper:  p. 2686-2691 (with Geraldo Lima)