There's Not an App for That

Chapter 4

Opportunity 1.2

Inspired by Fashion

Abstract

Fabrics and clothes protect us and express who we are. They can be stretched, tugged, patted, smoothed. They wear and tear and develop a patina of use over time. They provide, then, a much broader set of affordances and displays than today’s touch screens. In this Opportunity chapter, we explore how we might redesign apps, visualizations and gestures by using fashion thinking.

Keywords

fabric; clothes; fashion; touch; skeumorph

What’s the Opportunity?

In this chapter we’ll be looking at clothes—how they make us feel, how they respond to our bodies, and how we express ourselves through them.

Perhaps you’ve said it yourself: “I feel naked without my mobile phone!” It’s a great way to emphasize how important ...