The Role of Design in Wearable Computing

This paper has been used to highlight our thought on some of the issues that are to be raised at the Design Workshop. Including brief discussion on; how design fits into wearable computing, how evaluations of design contributions can be made, guidance for designers and submissions, interdisciplinary working practices and their usefulness to wearable computing, and of design issues applicable to wearable computing. Our views are formed as designers and therefore will provide a insight for the traditional ‘non-designer’ wearable computing community. We hope that this paper will encourage further in depth discussion. This paper is intended to contribute towards establishing a valid set of recommendations, which will be used to drive the issues and implementation of design within the wearable computing community. 1. Design and Wearable Computing The first question that we must ask ourselves is; What is design? It is a tricky question to ask in general, and is often a hot topic of discussion within the academic design community. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘design’ as; i. “a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or working of a building, garment or other object before it is made” ii. “the art or action of conceiving of and producing a plan or drawing of something before it is made” iii. “purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact or object” From the definition we see that to design something means that it must be planned with a purpose in mind. The design community is very diverse, covering a wide range of areas, from the harder engineering design to the softer artistic design. Design Activities range from integrated circuit design, textiles, system design, interiors, industrial design, software user-interface design and fashion design. Each has different working practices and measures of assessment. ‘Design’ within the wearable computing community, seems to be seen as the softer end of the spectrum. Design in wearable computing, is often associated with fashion shows, which is great for media coverage, but misses the point. The design of personal computers was once just about putting components into beige boxes, with command line interfaces and ‘green screens’. Nowadays they come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, colours and materials, made possible by the redesign of the internal hardware components. The most striking difference for the everyday PC user is the move from textual commands to the Graphical User Interface (GUI). The industrial design of personal computing is becoming ever more important and is highlighted by the current Apple advertising campaign of Mac versus PC, or design versus functionality. This is a general phenomenon that occurs as technologies mature and consumers expect more from the products, expecting them to fulfill functional and aesthetic/emotional needs [1]. Design for wearables is more than just putting electronic components into fashionable clothing, the whole system should be considered as part of the design process. These should include; physical form, electronic components, GUI, physical interface and embodied product value [2]. There are several areas of design which are specifically relevant to wearable computing, software design, in particular user interface, and to a larger extent user experience, hardware design (which is at the more traditional engineering end of the spectrum), and wearability. Studies around wearability have not featured as prominently as one may expect, although there have been several recent papers at ISWC which have examined the issue [3, 4, 5, 6 & 7], they still remain very much a minority. The term ‘wearability’ can be used to describe the process and experience of donning, wearing, using and removing a wearable computer ‘garment’. In addition the care and maintenance of such garments require further study before wearable computers can be developed into true mainstream products. 1.1 The Benefits of Qualitative Analysis Assessing the success of a particular design is very difficult as assessor opinions are often subjective, having cultural and personal influences. Designs could potentially be assessed against the original design specification, which would be unique to each project. Using criteria such as; is the designs functionality fit for purpose?; and is the design capable of solving the described problem? There are many different evaluation techniques that could potentially be applied to the design of wearable computers. Reductionist approaches such as [8] and [9] enable us to distinguish efficient methods of interacting with wearable computers. However tests such as these are conducted in controlled ‘laboratory’ conditions, and may not accurately reflect the circumstances encountered in the real world. From a designers perspective some of the most interesting results within these papers is found amongst the qualitative data. Comments such as: “I feel if the device was larger it would be easier to manage.” [9], or (with reference to a gesture based numeric entry system) “I made use of the fact that ‘8’ is a full circle [and] later learned other patterns” [8] are potentially of great benefit to the design process. This type of insight is invaluable to a designer wanting to improve an existing product or wishing to seek new interaction techniques. Qualitative information is highly prized with the design community, identifying softer and sometimes unexpected results, which could not be generated using quantitative techniques. We feel that a greater emphasis should be placed upon qualitative evaluation methods such as, observing people who are interacting with wearable computers in real world scenarios. It would be a positive step to have this type of qualitative data moved from the small ‘discussion’ sections at the end of papers and instead become the core of detailed ethnographic studies. 2. Design Submissions & Presentations Design conferences usually use a traditional paper submission process which is not too dissimilar from IEEE submission requirements. For instance the submission guidelines for the 15th International Product Development Management Conference [10] states two of its requirements for papers as: i. The theoretical base must be made clear, and references to already-existing research in the field must be made explicit. ii. Priority is given to research which has an empirical basis. This means that conceptual discussions without empirical tests or basis will be accepted only exceptionally. However there are other design conferences that do not have such tight requirements, allowing submission to be a more creative. At these conferences there are usually discussions of produced works and the processes employed to achieve them. This is done much in the same way as the wearable computing community, although the content is very different. Papers at design conferences frequently take the form of case studies. Design conferences often have broad outlooks, encouraging inter-disciplinary/cross-disciplinary discussions. For instance at the 2nd International Conference on Design Principles and Practices, encompasses the perspectives and practices of: “anthropology, architecture, art, artificial intelligence, business, cognitive science, communication studies, computer science, cultural studies, design studies, education, e-learning, engineering, ergonomics, fashion, graphic design, history, information systems, industrial design, industrial engineering, instructional design, interior design, interaction design, interface design, journalism, landscape architecture, law, linguistics and semiotics, management, media and entertainment, psychology, sociology, software engineering, technical communication, telecommunications, urban planning and visual design.” [11] As you can see this scope is vast, with many areas which would not necessarily be considered by noncommercial designers to be a concern of design. This phenomenon is endemic to the design community; which has constant desire to know more and try to form new improved solutions to design problems. The design community itself is in a current state of flux, this can bee seen in the contextual statement for the 2008 Design Research Society, “Designing seems to be moving into a new era, the disciplines that have framed our work are reshaping themselves, new kinds of designing are emerging and we are not yet able to define these new and hybrid professions, some created by people not previously thought of as designers”.[12] It could be noted that the wearable computing community currently seems to be in a similar state of flux. There seems to be no easy way to absolutely pin down a limited set of criteria which a design submission must follow, as is with design, it can sometimes be a little unpredictable. Design submissions for wearable computing may initially follow the standard route for submission, or may be a shortened proposal route, which would not require a full paper to be submitted, but would require an in depth demonstration and reflection upon the work produced. 3. Guidance for Designers Submissions should clearly outline the design methodology and methods used. It should be demonstrated how problems were identified and how the effectiveness of the proposed design solution was assessed. Designers of wearable computers should be encouraged to develop new methods for designing and evaluating their solutions. This could include discussions about collaborative working practices and the development of new, shared languages. The development of wearable computers pose complex design problems. Complex design problems require more knowledge than any single person can provide because the knowledge relevant to a problem is usually distributed among several stakeholders. This can often bring opposing and controversial viewpoints together creating a shared understanding among the stakeholders, potentially leading to new insights and ideas.