From wearable computing to the design of interactive open wearables. The impact of Open Design and Open Hardware on the design of wearable computing applications. Serena Cangiano, Zoe Romano, Massimo Banzi SUPSI, Lugano Switzerland / University Iuav of Venice, Venice, Italy Openwear, Milan, Italy Arduino, Lugano, Switzerland serena.cangiano@supsi.ch, zoe@dazoescope.com, m.banzi@arduino.cc
Abstract Wearable computing refers to the study or practice of inventing, designing, building, or using miniature body-borne computational and sensory devices. While the technological development supports the diffusion of wearable computing solutions within the end-user market, the emerging practices of Open design and Open hardware are stimulating the configuration of novel scenarios for the design of interactive wearables where collaboration and openness play the pivotal role. Through the demonstration of processes and prototypes developed during a wearable computing workshop featuring the combination of digital fabrication techniques, Open Design approaches and Open Hardware tools, the paper points at describing a preliminary set of implications of the assumed shift from wearable computing to the design of interactive open wearables, artifacts that are collaboratively designed, digitally crafted and interactive. KEYWORDS: Open Design, Open Hardware, wearable computing, digital fabrication, interaction design education.
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Introduction Wearable computing is the study or practice of inventing, designing, building, or using miniature body-borne computational and sensory devices (Mann, 2012). According to Steve Mann (1996), wearable technologies include solutions in which computers may be embedded in clothing, or, may also be themselves clothes. Thanks to the miniaturization of sensors and the developments of ubiquitous systems, smart textiles and power solution (1), many visions related to researches and experimentations in the field of wearable computing are today applications that hit the end-users technology market: smart technologies became products that can be worn and used in different contexts, from the entertainment market to the development of smart solutions in working spaces or of medical assistive devices (Smailagic & Kenn, 2011). Nevertheless those achievements, unpredictable design practices are currently highlighting how the wearability in computing could not be exclusively dependent on technological factors, but rather it can be driven by social and bottomup innovation factors.
We name unpredictable design practices those ones that have been generated by the DIY and open source culture and that are currently influencing the design and innovation field by proposing alternative approaches to design, production and business models. In particular, we refer to the practices related to these three main fields: - Open Source Hardware (OSHW) that is a term used for tangible artifacts — machines, devices, or other physical things — whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things (OSHWA board, 2011); - Open Design that is the development of physical products, machines and systems through use of publicly shared design information; - digital fabrication that refers to the translation of digital designs into physical objects using computer-controlled machine.
Key concepts of the revolutionary impact of Open Hardware, Open Design and digital fabrication are openness, customizability, connectedness and co-creation: people are able to access information, shared over the Internet, on how to build, modify and program interactive objects (Kuznetsov & Paulos, 2010). Thanks to open hardware platforms (i.e. Arduino project), communities of DIY amateurs transform in “makers” that are able to set up sustainable businesses based on small-scale productions of open source goods (Anderson, 2012). This phenomenon has been made possible especially by:
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- the rising accessibility to digital fabrication tools as laser cutters, 3D printers and 3D modeling software; - the diffusion of an ecosystem of web applications supporting designers, makers and craftsmen to easily share the designs of their collections or lines of products in order to facilitate the creation of derivatives and the consequential process of “social product development” (Van Abel, Klaassen, Evers & Troxler, 2011).
The paper will focus on how this phenomenon related to open source and diy practices affected the development of wearable computing solution through the introduction of elements such as the peer-to-peer production (collaboration) and digital craft (craft enhanced by the use of computer-controlled machines).
Introducing open hardware, open design and digital fabrication in wearable computing: the Workshop in physical and wearable computing at SUPSI We describe in this paper the method, tools and results of the Workshop on physical and wearable computing held at SUPSI, the University of applied sciences and arts of southern Switzerland in July 2012. The workshop was organized within the Summer school in digital fabrication and interaction design, whose goal is to teach – through a learning by doing approach – how to transfer digital information to computer-controlled machinery and how to implement sensing systems in order to create physical and open interactive artifacts. The addressed challenge of the workshop was to teach how to manage new manufacturing processes in order to create objects that can be digitally fabricated and distributed or built and collaboratively improved by the users’ community. Furthermore, a primary goal was to teach how to manage technological factors in order to create objects that can be open source and that features interactive behaviors. The workshop is used as case study for explaining the implications of the application of Open Design and Open Hardware in the process of designing interactive wearable systems that - in this paper - are defined as interactive open wearables.
Workshop objectives and method The workshop in physical and wearable computing had the goal of designing and prototyping objects that sense, interpret and react to the real world and that can be wearable and digitally fabricated. The workshop gathered participants with different design and technology skills, both beginners and experts, professionals and students of different age (2).
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The workshop was structured as follows: »
during the first phase, notions of physical and wearable computing were provided together with an introduction to the fundamentals of Arduino, the open source hardware platform for prototyping interactive objects. The Arduino project was adopted as main reference for introducing the knowledge of programming and electronic prototyping to non-expert people (Banzi, 2008). The goal of this preliminary phase was to teach participants how to program the interaction between sensors and actuators by using Arduino and, in particular, how to implement basic interactive behaviours in fashionable and wearable computing prototypes (Olsson, Gaetano, Odhner, Wiklund, 2011).
During the second phase, two complementary topics have been introduced: »
digital fabrication techniques and the notions related to the emergent framework of the third industrial revolution (Markillie, 2012); in particular, participants were introduced to concepts such as peer to peer production, social product development, open source 3D printing and laser cutting, internet platforms for designs sharing;
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the application of open design principles to the open source fashion and, in particular, to the implementation of digitally fabricated fashionable artifacts featuring interactive and smart behaviors.
We decided to adopt the Openwear project as main reference project for explaining the basic principle of the open design approach. The Openwear project, launched in 2010, is a research project funded by the European Community whose aim is to provide an on-line collaborative platform for fashion creation and a community that accesses knowledge about practices of collaborative and distributed work. The platform is addressed to students, independent designers, social enterprises, researchers who create collaborative collections that can be freely downloaded, customized and sold under an open-source collective brand (Niessen, Koefoed, Skov, Romano, Delfanti, 2010).
Tools During the workshop specific tools and electronic kits were used to support the prototyping activities: »
Arduino Leonardo boards and Lilypad boards were adopted in order to prototype the electronics and the hardware components of the projects while the Arduino software and Processing were applied in the software development; other open source software tools were used such as libraries and already existing examples of Arduino programs for supporting the teaching phase of the basic notions of physical computing;
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a kit specifically developed for implementing interactive wearables: the kit features stretch sensors, conductive threads, textile perfboard, knitted coated copper, tape and textile push buttons;
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a collection of wearable prototypes that have been designed by designers collaborating on the Openwear project. The collection included the designs of a modular belt, a felt pocket, a glove, shoes wings, a hat and foldable slippers.
All the wearables of the Openwear collection were designed to be “hacked”: workshop participants were able to modify, rescale and adapt them by manipulating the parameters of each design through a 2D design software.
Figure 1. Arduino boards.
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Figure 2. Wearable kit.
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Figure 3. Openwear collection of 2D wearables.
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Results of the workshop The Arduino platform and the Openwear wearable collection enabled participants to implement their concepts of wearable computing solutions and make interactive prototypes that can be worn; feature embedded electronics activating interactive behaviors; are digitally fabricated; are open source. The workshop results included nine prototypes of interactive open wearables. In the following paragraphs, we describe three of the nine projects that we consider emblematic in respect to the goal of this paper.
a. Superfluo shoe The Superfluo shoes prototype (3) implements the concept of shoes that communicate the correct position of the foot while the user is walking (assistive function) and the user’s fashion profile such as metrosexual, punk, glamour (communicative function). The prototype is based on the foldable slippers design that is laser cut in acrylic felt. The slipper features an outsole with a decorative texture made through a light laser cut and by a LEDs grid. The decorative texture allows the light feedback of the LEDs grid to be visible through the outsole of the shoe. The LEDs are activated by pressure sensors embedded in the sole. The communication between the LEDs and the pressure sensors is enabled by an Arduino programmed through Processing software.
Figure 4. Superfluo shoe prototype.
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b. Balance belt The Balance belt project (4) implements the concept of a wearable system that provides a physical “sense of balance� to people suffering balance disorders (assistive function). People suffering of this kind of diseases usually needs stable points of reference when they walk (i.e. walls) in order to avoid the sense of vertigo. The belt is based on the Openwear modular belt that was laser cut in acrylic felt. The belt features triple axes accelerometers that send data to a Lilypad board. The board is connected - through conductive threads - to LEDs and servomotors that provide users with the haptic and light feedbacks intended to be the artificial equilibrium sense.
Figure 5. Superfluo shoe prototype. c. Frog back The Frog back (5) is an accessory whose goal is to protecting bicycle riders and pedestrians against accidents. The accessory consists in an LEDs system embedded in an piece of acrylic that can be worn as a back-pack. The LEDs are connected through conductive threads to a Lilypad board sewed at the center of the internal side of the wearable. The light sensors connected to the board detect the light in the environment and activate the LEDs system according to the level of brightness. When it is dark, the LEDs light on in order to indicate the presence of the bicycle rider or pedestrian.
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Figure 6. Frogback prototype.
Implications of the design of interactive open wearables. The process, tools and results of the workshop on wearable computing allow to highlight a preliminary set of implications of the application of Open Design and Open Hardware on the design of wearable computing applications. The implications are the following:
a. Building shared software libraries for the implementation of interactive open wearables. Prototyping interactive artifacts through open source software is based, for example, on the activity of mashing up existing software developed and shared within the on-line developers community. The process of designing and prototyping interactive open wearables is affected by this practice and, at the same time, it supports that practice through the creation of shared software libraries specifically addressed to the implementation of interactive wearables. The software libraries can be re-used by other people that can improve and share them again within the on-line communities.
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b. Facilitating the development of open wearable design collections. The creation of wearable designs that can be customized by the end users - in our case the workshop participants - facilitate the creation of collections of designs suitable to the implementation of interactive wearables. An example is the Frog back project that featured a brand new design that was implemented and then released under creative commons as an additional wearable of the Openwear collection.
c. Developing a catalogue of wearable design solutions for embedding electronics. The design used in the development of the Balance belt project was a derivative of the Modular belt, one of the designs included in the Openwear collection. Differently from the Modular belt, the Balance belt derivative includes an additional module consisting in a pocket place on the front of the belt. The pocket was added in order to hold and hide the Lilypad board that controlled the LEDs and vibration system. This case demonstrate that the application of the Open Design approach - that support the possibility to built upon other people’s designs and to create derivatives - facilitate the development of specific wearable collections and, in particular, of a set of wearable solutions for embedding electronics and conductive materials into fabrics and clothes.
d. Facilitating the process of crafting interactive wearables. The opportunity of developing and sharing “libraries” of design solutions for the wearability of electronics combined with the use of digital fabrication tools facilitates the process of “crafting” interactive objects. Workshop participants were able to create pleasurable interactive accessories without having any background in fashion design and to craft them easily through computer controlled machines.
e. Developing low-tech and low-cost open assistive technologies. Most of the projects featured the combination of both assistive and communication functions. Participants were able to prototype accessories that support people with specific diseases such as vertigo or wrong posture of the feet. These prototypes demonstrate how Open Hardware and Design affect the design and development of assistive technologies that are based on low-cost and low-tech solutions.
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Conclusions The process, tools and results of the workshop on wearable computing help to demonstrate how emerging practices such as Open Design and Open Hardware are stimulating the configuration of novel scenarios in the field of wearable computing. We described the key-elements of the design process applied during the Workshop on wearable computing organized at SUPSI and we analysed the results in order to define a preliminary set of implications related to the application of Open design and Open hardware in the design of wearable computing applications. The preliminary implications highlight the fact that collaboration and openness play a pivotal role in the process of designing and prototyping interactive open wearables. Differently from the definition of wearable computing applications, these artifacts can be collaboratively designed, digitally crafted and, moreover, shared over the Internet. Designing interactive open wearables also means to nurture an ecosystem of digital and physical instructions that empowers community of non-expert people and that activates collaborative processes of innovation.
The set of implications derived by the analysis of the Workshop in wearable computing is only a preliminary attempt of defining the impact of Open design and Open hardware on the design of wearable computing applications. The topic will be further investigated through the analysis of prospective workshops.
References S. Mann, “Wearable Computing” in: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.),Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation, 2012. Available online at www.interactiondesign.org/encyclopedia/wearable_computing.html S. Mann, “Smart Clothing: The Wearable Computer and WearCam,” in: Personal Technologies, Vol.1 No.1 Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1997 F. Gonzalez, P. Harrop, “Batteries and Supercapacitors for Smart Portable Devices 2013-2023: Markets, Technologies, Companies. Energy Storage for Laptops, Smartphones, Tablet PCs, Digital Cameras and Wireless Sensors”, A. Smailagic, H. Kenn, “New Advances in Wearable Computing” in: Pervasive Computing, IEEE, Vol. 10, p. 96-100, 2011 S. Kuznetsov, E. Paulos, “Rise of the Expert Amateur: DIY Projects, Communities, and Cultures” in: Proceedings of NordiCHI ‘10 of the 6th Nordic Conference on HumanComputer Interaction: Extending Boundaries, p. 295-304, ACM New York, NY, USA 2010 M. Banzi, “Getting started with Arduino”, O’Reilly Media, CA, 2008 T. Olsson, D. Gaetano, J. Odhner, S. Wiklund, “Open softwear”, BlushingBoy Publishing, Sweden, 2011 P. Markillie, “The third industrial revolution”, in The Economist, April, 2012
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B. Niessen, O. Koefoed, L. Skov, Z. Romano, A. Delfanti “OpenWear. Sustainability, Opennes and p2p production in the world of fashion”, in: Research report of the EDUfashion project. Available at: http://openwear.org/data/files/Openwear%20e-book%20final.pdf C. Anderson, “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution”, Crown Business, New York, 2012 P. Troxler “Libraries of the peer production era” in: B. van Abel, L. Evers, R. Klaassen, P. Troxler Open Design Now, BIS Publisher, Amsterdam, 2011 Open source hardware definition v. 1.1, available at: http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW www.openwear.org, visited on 1st October 2012 www.Arduino.cc, visited on 1st October 2012 1. New battery for wearable electronics, published at www.energyharvestingjournal.com/articles/new-battery-for-wearable-electronics00005113.asp?sessionid=1 2. The workshop took place from 23 to 27 July 2012 at Campus Trevano SUPSI. The teachers are Massimo Banzi and Zoe Romano. Participants of the workshop are: Andrea Rossi (IT), Barbara Bartos (US), Gaurag Desai (AU), Fazil Akin (CH), Francesco Mussi (CH), Giovanni Profeta (CH), Giuseppe Bessero Belti (CH), Orly Golan (IL), Joachim Pietsch (IE), Luca Pietro Gattoni (CH), Matteo Mattia (IT), Thomas Amberg (CH), Troy Nachtigall (US), Monir Karimi (AT). Workshop website: www.maind.supsi.ch/blogs/workshop-in-physical-andwearable-computing. Luke Chen (NL), Lila Panahi Kazemi (DE), Claudia Zampella (IT). 3. Superfluo shoe was developed during the workshop by Troy Nachtigall (US), troykyo.com 4. Balance belt was developed during the workshop by Thomas Amberg (CH), balanceshirt.tumblr.com 5. Frog back was developed during the workshop by Orly Golan (IL), Gaurag Desai (AU), Fazil Akin (CH).
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