Wearables as medium of expression between bodies

Abstract: This thesis introduces the exploration of making wearables as a collaborative expression between a performer and a participant in a performative participatory installation. With a phenomenological view on our embodied experience with technology, the methodological approach is program/experiment dialectics, mixing experiments in the lab with exploration in the field. The thesis introduces the full process, the program and experiments where the perception (the embodied interaction with the materials and the context) of the designer/researcher and participants has been a great resource of the iterative process of creating the prototype from sketching in digital material, to prototyping and testing. From the making of the final prototype it is concluded that, the participant and performer express shared movement as the performance is constituted by both technology and human agency - both wearable and body acts - in the interaction between interpretation, body, and experience on the one side, and concept, werable, and technology on the other. As a methodological knowledge contribution it is stated that program/experiment dialectics is a generous space, allowing elements from several other methods, non linearity, and intuition, to be part of the process, where researcher (and participants) are phenomenologists. Phenomenology in interaction design is an attribution to research through design as a method that allows room for active participation of the lived body in different stages of the design process - a development of the notion of embodiment beyond situatedness - acknowledging the interplay between bodies and technology, that users, artifacts, and contexts influence, touch, and touch back each other.