[ISEA2011] Panel: Sara Di­a­mond – Mov­ing Softly For­ward

Panel Statement

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

This paper iden­ti­fies themes in wear­able tech­nol­ogy prac­tices within the con­text of re­search in uni­ver­si­ties and art and de­sign schools as well as in­dus­trial lab­o­ra­to­ries to sug­gest op­por­tu­ni­ties for con­cen­tra­tion of ef­forts and in­ter­na­tional col­lab­o­ra­tion. Re­search using bio­met­ric data, heart rate mon­i­tors, em­bed­ded sen­sors, blue tooth and mo­bile net­works, con­duc­tive threads, soft cir­cuitry, smart tex­tiles and shape met­als and other adap­tive fab­rics occur at sites in around the world.  Where are these? Sec­ondly, the paper be­gins to map these re­search ef­forts to the po­ten­tial of take-up by adopters (fash­ion de­sign­ers, health­care, and se­cu­rity ser­vices as ex­am­ples).  Fi­nally it sug­gests some op­por­tu­ni­ties for col­lab­o­ra­tion and points to strate­gies needed to bridge the gap be­tween re­search or art and de­sign pro­to­typ­ing and large-scale adop­tion.

  • Sara Di­a­mond is the Pres­i­dent of the OCAD Uni­ver­sity, Canada’s “uni­ver­sity of the imag­i­na­tion”. She holds a PhD in Com­puter Sci­ence and de­grees in new media the­ory and prac­tice, so­cial his­tory and com­mu­ni­ca­tions. While re­tain­ing OCAD Uni­ver­sity’s tra­di­tional strengths in art and de­sign, she has led her uni­ver­sity to be­come a leader in dig­i­tal media and de­sign re­search and cur­ricu­lum through the Dig­i­tal Fu­tures Ini­tia­tive, to­wards new re­search in In­clu­sive De­sign and health and de­sign, as well as in sus­tain­able tech­nolo­gies and de­sign. She has also led OCAD Uni­ver­sity to begin the unique Abo­rig­i­nal Vi­sual Cul­ture Pro­gram. She is co-prin­ci­ple in­ves­ti­ga­tor on the Cen­tre for In­for­ma­tion Vi­su­al­iza­tion/Data Dri­ven De­sign, an OCADU/York Uni­ver­sity major ini­tia­tive. She is co-chair of the Mo­bile Ex­pe­ri­ence In­no­va­tion Cen­tre.  Di­a­mond was the Artis­tic Di­rec­tor of Media and Vi­sual Art and Di­rec­tor of Re­search at the Banff Cen­tre, where she cre­ated the Banff New Media In­sti­tute (BNMI) in 1995 and led it until 2005. Di­a­mond de­vel­oped codezebra.net , a per­for­mance and media art, fash­ion and data vi­su­al­iza­tion soft­ware col­lab­o­ra­tion en­vi­ron­ment. Di­a­mond con­tin­ues to write about dig­i­tal media his­tory, data vi­su­al­iza­tion, mo­bile ex­pe­ri­ence de­sign, dig­i­tal media and de­sign strat­egy for peer re­viewed jour­nals and cu­rates for fes­ti­vals and gal­leries.

Full text (PDF) p. 622-629