[Description]
Despite technological improvements in commercial activity trackers, little attention has been given to their emotional, social, or fashion-related qualities, such as their visual aesthetics and their relationship to self-expression and social connection. As an alternative integrated approach incorporating HCI, fashion, and product design, our project made use of the characteristics of patina to improve activity trackers as fashionable wearables. We developed the Patina Engraving System, which engraves patina-like patterns on an activity tracker according to a user’s activity logs. Using a piercing technique, the patina of activity logs has been made abstract, visually rich, gradually emerging, and historically accumulated. During the field trial, we found that the patina motivated the participants to increase exercises for engraving aesthetic patinas. A tracker with patina triggered spontaneous social interactions in face-toface situations. The participants also cherished the trackers that held their own history. Based on the field trial, we discuss design implications for utilizing patina in designing future fashionable technologies.
Despite technological improvements in commercial activity trackers, little attention has been given to their emotional, social, or fashion-related qualities, such as their visual aesthetics and their relationship to self-expression and social connection. As an alternative integrated approach incorporating HCI, fashion, and product design, our project made use of the characteristics of patina to improve activity trackers as fashionable wearables. We developed the Patina Engraving System, which engraves patina-like patterns on an activity tracker according to a user’s activity logs. Using a piercing technique, the patina of activity logs has been made abstract, visually rich, gradually emerging, and historically accumulated. During the field trial, we found that the patina motivated the participants to increase exercises for engraving aesthetic patinas. A tracker with patina triggered spontaneous social interactions in face-toface situations. The participants also cherished the trackers that held their own history. Based on the field trial, we discuss design implications for utilizing patina in designing future fashionable technologies.
[Publications]
Lee, MH., Cha, S., & Nam, TJ. (2015, April). Patina engraver: Visualizing activity logs as patina in fashionable trackers. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1173–1182. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702213
Lee, MH., Cha, S., & Nam, TJ. (2015, April). Patina engraver: Visualizing activity logs as patina in fashionable trackers. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1173–1182. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702213
Lee, MH; Nam, TJ; "Possibility of Utilizing Digital Traces for Enhancing Emotional Values of Digital Artifacts", 디자인학연구, vol.29, no.2, pp.65~77, 2016.05
[Awards]
Best Paper Award, CHI 2015
Best Paper Award, CHI 2015