Wearables: The Next Frontier of Brand - People Interaction? Thoughts on Vibrating Underwear, Navigator Coats and Hepatic Communication
“Five years from now, we may be sorting our laundry based on whites, coloreds and wearables.”—one of the panelists in the MobileWeek conference quipped. It is an interesting, and certainly not a far fetched assertion if the uptake of the Apple Smart watch were any indication, which reportedly generated as much as 2 million pre-orders.
Several factors are helping fast-track the trajectory of wearables. From the supply side, computer chips are becoming smaller, as well as cheaper and faster to produce, as good old Moore predicted. Parallel breakthroughs in its close cousins— IOT (Internet of Things), data and cloud computing are serving as catalysts in wearable tech innovation. But my personal theory is that if there’s one thing that would ultimately push this overboard into the mainstream, it is simply necessity for brands and marketers. The fact is, the real estate for visual and audio communication is almost completely saturated. A study by the San Diego Supercomputer Center projected that by 2015, the average person will be exposed to 6.9 million-million gigabytes of information, that would take roughly more than 15 hours a day to see or hear. That means exposure to information every minute of every waking hour. At this rate, brands who want to compete for airtime would have to find a way to do it in our sleep.
Or, they could venture forth and find new lands—welcome to the next frontier of wearables.
When we think of wearables, the default association for most people is bands and watches. No big surprise since the technology was first popularly adopted in these formats. But, when I think about the potential for wearables, what excites me most is the idea of seamlessly integrating it in our clothes—the articles that are closest to our bodies. I personally like Billie Whitehouse’s definition as pieces of clothing that are imbued with intelligence so that they can serve a greater purpose. Billie is touted as the Elon Musk of fashion for the breakthrough work that her company, Wearable Experiments is creating. They are trading big, clunky and unnatural wearable tech products for ones that are subtle, organically designed, washable and truly wearable.
What excites me most about the promise of this kind of wearable technology?
One important reason is that it will help bring people back to the here and now of the physical world. While mobile technology is enabling us to be efficient, productive, and more connected, it is also sucking us into another world, relentlessly stealing our attention from the present. With the notification function of smart watches for instance, we wouldn’t need to be glued to our phones the entire time, so we can focus our attention on where we are and the people we’re with. We can be proper human beings again. In effect it is freeing us from the shackles of hyper-connectedness and the fear of missing out. Another innovation along this line is Wear:Ex’s Navigate blazers. It is a wearable navigator powered by Google maps that gives you the signal to turn left, right, or stop with a tap on your shoulders. This way, instead of burying your head down on your phone to follow google’s instructions, you can now pay attention to your surroundings.
Wearable fashion will provide a previously unexplored and untapped dimension in how we we communicate— through the sense of touch. If we think about it, touch is the most primal of our senses. Scientists have found that even before birth we’ve already been receiving tactile signals in the form of our mother’s heartbeat amplified by amniotic fluid, laying the foundations of the mother and child bond. Our skins are like finely tuned barometers of emotions, changing in temperature, color, texture, suppleness when we’re angry, happy, excited, afraid, embarrassed, guilty, in-love even. It gives us insights into our emotions more powerfully than the spoken word ever could.
Executed right, wearables can tap into the power hepatic communication, and the best part is, it can do it even from a distance. Imagine a mother who is still able to caress her baby to sleep while she’s away from home with a vest that translates her gestures on her mobile phone to a sensorial output. That’s just my badly put idea. If you want an actual product, just take a look at Wear-Ex’s Alert Shirt. It is a jersey that is able to transmit the player’s sensations to the fans from a tackle to a nervous penalty kick, redefining what an immersive experience means. Or think about about the Fundawear—undies with special vibrating zones developed with Durex to enhance adult playtime (I’m sure you get the picture.) Given how our connections through various platforms multiply exponentially, fulfillment will be measured less by latitude and more by the depth of our experiences.
Exciting developments are happening in the scientific and design fronts. A scientist in Sussex is conducting experiments in how human emotion can be transferred by technology that stimulates different parts of the hand without making physical contact with your body, and just using bursts of air. Meanwhile a student at Umeå Institute of Design is exploring how “interaction designers can leverage and embrace the sense of touch to develop interfaces and experiences that go beyond traditional visual and form-based aesthetics.”
This will force brands and marketers to think value first, brand second. If people were to allow something to get so close to them and really close the gap of intimate, intimate space it will have to be something intrinsically useful. It will spell the end of brands with their empty ‘messages’ and begin the era of brands walking the talk and delivering their purpose. Key to its mainstream adoption is the design and usability aspect. It will have to be organic and out of the way of people’s natural behavior and predispositions. As Chris Lehman aptly put it, technology is like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary and invisible.
