Design for wearability

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Abstract
Digital Technology is constantly improving as information becomes wireless. These advances demand more wearable and mobile form factors for products that access information. A product that is wearable should have wear- ability. This paper explores the concept of dynamic wearability through design research. Wearability is defined as the interaction between the human body and the wearable object. Dynamic wearability extends that definition to include the human body in motion. Our research has been to locate, understand, and define the spaces on the human body where solid and flexible forms can rest - without interfering with fluid human movement. The result is a set of design guidelines embodied in a set of wearable forms. These wearable forms describe the three dimensional spaces on the body best suited for comfortable and unobtrusive wearability by design. WHY IS WEARABILITY IMPORTANT? Current trends in computing tools are consistent with society's historical need to evolve its tools and products into more portable, mobile, and even wearable form factors. Time pieces, radios, and telephones are common examples of this trend. With advances in technology, miniaturization, and wireless communication, access to information is no longer limited to the static environment of the office desktop and personal computer. Well- designed mobile and wearable products can offer more portable and effective ways for people to relate to this information. However, simply shrinking down computing tools from the desktop paradigm to a more portable scale only makes them into mini PC's. It does not take advantage of the opportunities presented by a whole new context of use. It does not regard the human body as a context. The word wearable implies the use of the human body as a support environment for the product. The human body is active, its form is diverse and changing. Wearable design that respects these dynamics results in product wearability. Existing static human anthropometric data provides a limited description of the body (1,2). Beyond these simple dimensions, no resources describing how to design wearable forms for the human body have been found. These issues considered, there is an obvious need for a more in depth understanding of the role of human form in wearable product design. Our study, Design for Wearability, evolves from over seven years of hands-on, interdisciplinary, in-the-field experience developing mobile and wearable computer systems for a variety of industrial, commercial, and military applications (3,4). From this experience we have mapped the design space for developing wearable systems. Wearable computer design involves a great deal of compromise, inevitably encountered when integrating issues of human form and human-computer interaction with the constraints of technology and the context-of-use.

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