Photography by Sangli Li

An Intel sponsored project on wearable technologies.

Meet Chuck, an artificial intelligence that lives on my shoulder. As a intelligent and adorable fluffy creature, Chuck challenges wearable technologies with the following questions:

Can the human body be seen as wearables?
How much does the aesthetics of wearables matter?
Can we have an ecology of different wearables instead of just one piece of hardware?

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The human body as a wearable
When I choose not to interact with the world, Chuck takes over my body. My body becomes a vessel for Chuck and Dao to navigate the world. I change from the “wearer” to the “wearable”. Although we tend to think of wearables as an add-on to ourselves, the active data gathering, suggestions
and data sharing of our wearables may suggest otherwise.

If our body becomes a farm for wearables to gather and upload different sorts data, aren’t we wearables to other things? If we think of the traffic function on Google maps as a person, then this person would be naked without thousands of smartphone users pushing live traffic data to the cloud.

Aesthetic of the wearable: we are defined by what we put on.
Living in a visual world, we are defined by thing we put onto our body. Different from clothing, wearables changes not only how we look but also how we interact with the world. Having a moving stuffed animal on one’s should may seem insane under most context, but even the most insane wearables, like this stuffed animal, become suitable when its intended to evoke conversations. Can the context of using a wearable be driven by the looks of the wearable?

Hierarchy: an ecology of different wearables 
The communication between different wearables becomes orders, feedbacks and negotiations. If one machine can not function without another machine, how might the user experience them differently?