Designing for Wearables

Chapter 1. Design Follows Technology

With all disciplines of design, as technology progresses, the restrictions become fewer and fewer until they get to the point at which a wave crashes and there’s nothing holding you back from making anything you can dream of. Architecture became bolder when steel frames could support nearly any structure architects could dream of without being restricted by the need to cater to gravity to the degree they needed to when building with stone alone. Furniture evolved with advancements in the technology of the materials available to designers, such as fiberglass and bending plywood, as well as technological advancements related to mass manufacturing processes. In graphic design, typefaces became increasingly more complex and detailed as printing technologies evolved to the point that those details could be reproduced accurately, and then it went completely insane when computers removed nearly all graphical restrictions.

Digital Maturity

Wearable technology has been around in one form or another since 17th-century China when someone came up with an abacus that you could wear on your finger. So, what’s so special about wearable technology at this point in time? There’s a reason wearable technology is making a resurgence. It’s because we’ve finally made it to the digital maturity tipping point: the point at which advancements in computing and the supporting infrastructure have lessened the restrictions of the design of technology so that they’re nearly ...