Intangible technologies Consumer culture has unfortunately impacted on contemporary society in such a dramatic way that the term ‘technology’ conjures images of electronic devices and ‘gadgets’ in the minds of many. That is only partially true. A smartwatch for example is a technological device that is wearable, it represents a contemporary advancement of computing, electronics and manufacturing that permits the end consumer to wear a miniature computer for a range of purposes. A garment on the other hand may seem commonplace, but is representative of thousands of years of learned skill, from the manipulation of natural fibre to the production of cloth on mechanical looms. It is unfortunately easy to forget that fabric creation and garment construction are not just technologies but highly integrated sets of technologies. For a modern human to wear a garment is to honour a continuous advancement of technologies from a time before recorded civilisation. The watch or timepiece that preceded the smartwatch itself has a great history, Peter Henlein is credited as having made the leap from a stationary clock to a wearable device in the early 1500s. It was a rather large and heavy device by our standards but nevertheless it is wearable tech of the 16th century, and it is just as an important artefact as the microprocessor. Wearable devices such as, sports and smartwatches, activity trackers, bluetooth earpods and more are seemingly ubiquitous devices and may be overlooked as meaningful objects. They are plentiful, but now also economically important. In 2019 the total number of consumer wearable devices is expected to reach 453 million units, with a total revenue of 42 billion dollars [1]. The largest proportion of wearable devices continues to be ear worn devices and the second largest category is smartwatches. What the consumer market demonstrates is that entertainment still remains the primary purpose of the majority of wearable devices, but wearable technology for healthcare is climbing rapidly and rightly so for inextricably human reasons. The market success of wearable devices points to something in the human psyche that says we like things, and it is the materiality of the objects, garments and devices that we like. Deborah Lupton states
that humans have always been using materials as technologies [2]. The technologies at our disposal are digital in nature but housed in material form. Boundaries of self, blur as the objects become lighter and smaller and even implanted, but were these boundaries blurred some time ago? Clothes are technologies. Roland Barthes writes “the structure of real clothing can only be technological, because of clothes embeddedness in technological production (their traces of the actions of manufacture) and their structural fabrication (textiles, seams, zippers etc) [3]”. Barthes argues that Clothes are material and therefore not language, but Umberto Eco writes that “Clothes are Semiotic devices, machines for communication [4]. Susan Ryan supports Eco’s semiotic defense of the garment and by extension the wearable device. She writes that the “complex language of dress engages with wearable device, which has in fact, always involved technology at some level. To wear technological advancements or devices is to advance the language of dress in specific ways that converge with the cultural dimensions of technology, and as a result to be culturally seen within a technologically literate environment [5]”. We could not bear to be seen without our clothing. We choose particular fabrics and cut of garment for sensorial preference, and we make visual aesthetic choices for our body shape. We choose footwear because it can help us run faster, climb higher or support us well. Shoes for health and well-being are as technologically important as glucose monitors. This points to the meaning we are looking for in wearable technology, a good shoe, garment or activity tracker can do something for us. All of these objects have the potential to improve us to change us, and not just in a functional sense, they are aesthetically important to us as well. The sensory experience of what we wear can be haptic, visual, auditory and olfactory. The experience can also easily be multisensory. So wearable technology in all of its myriad forms can have meaning for us in a physiological sense but also in a psychological and even philosophical sense. The data that a device can gather and share is quantifiable, which permits the experience to be simultaneously sensory and intellectual. This is the greater issue that wearable technology brings. What can this new information that is private and sometimes public, do for us? If our boundaries with clothing
