Business of Fashion: For most people, wearable tech means gadgets worn on the body. You have a more expansive view. How do you define wearable tech?
Clothing should be our partner in getting through life.Amanda Parkes: Most simply, I define wearable tech as enabling interactivity around the body. The Apple Watch is an elegant, state-of-the-art piece of interactive technology and there is a massive market for this. But it exists in the domain of taking a smartphone and attaching it to our body. There are whole new unexplored categories of wearables to come.
It’s important to recognise that we are in the very early stages of this industry. When the Internet first emerged, no one could have conceived of the multiplicity of ways it would change our lives; solve function problems, yes, but also radically change our worldview. Wearables have this kind of potential because our bodies are our most intimate pieces of technology: they are entire ecosystems; they consume and create energy; they store and process data; they sense and communicate with their environments.
Clothing should be our partner in getting through life. It’s up to us to define how we tap into the many modalities of the body through clothing as the interface to help us navigate the world, communicate, entertain or generally bring us greater understanding of ourselves.
Wearable technology does not have to involve traditional circuits and batteries. The industry, right now, is pretty divided between the concept of wearables as devices and fibre science (wearables as materials). Fibre science is wearable technology in its purest form and I think the development of new smart textiles combining multiple layers of functionality is where this distinction will start to fade.
(via stoweboyd)
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