Friendship Jewellery 01                  2004

Between April 2004 and October 2005 I worked with the Research Consortium for Speckled Computing to create a suite of wirelessly networked jewellery. The first design iteration of three pieces is shown here.

The interaction has been designed to map the social activity of greeting, and the three distances at which members of a friendship group greet each other are reflected in the LED display on the two brooches and one pendant.  I based my investigations of tangible materials (enamels and precious metals, figure 3), on the vision of the 1mm cubed autonomous Speck, combining the notion of this spray-able, scatter-able sensing dust, with Maggie Orth’s vision for a malleable computational material.

A key driver for the research had been the everyday, and in looking for a way to describe the everyday, these distributed models led me to identify the friendship group as a crucial unit type of user group for interaction design, a building block of the wider social fabric. In looking for a design space within which it would be possible to observe the nature of distributed meaning, it seemed important to define a user group that had its own existing social ties, rather than amassing a 'sample' from a given demographic. The five women who took part in the doctoral work were

already a loose friendship group, and through their talk around the networked 'Speckled Jewellery' I made, I was able to get at how they made meaning together as a group, and what meanings they made concerning the jewellery. The individual jewellery objects are explicitly treated as parts of an interconnected system of meaning realised through an Actor Network of humans and artefacts, and the experiences and narratives woven around them are treated as emergent, dynamic, and collaboratively formed. 

link to second iteration pages

papers & articles:

Kettley, S (2005). Framing the Ambiguous Wearable. Convivio Online Journal. Framing the Ambiguous Wearable.pdf

Kettley, S. (2005). Visualising Social Space with Networked Jewellery. In Turner, P., Davenport, E., & Turner, S. (Eds.). More Space. Proceedings of the second workshop on Place, Spatiality and Technology, pp.92-98. Napier University, Edinburgh 12-14 December 2004.  Visualising Social Space with Networked Jewellery.pdf

Kettley, S. (2005). Crafts Praxis for Critical Wearables Design. In Proceedings Wearable Futures Conference, University of Wales, Newport, Sept 2005. Also in AI & Society Journal Vol. 21 (4) 2007 33.  crafts_praxis_wales.pdf

Kettley, S. (2005). Crafts Praxis as a Design Resource. In Proceedings of the Engineering & Product Design Education Conference, Napier University, Edinburgh, September 2005. P. Rodgers, L. Brodhurst, & D. Hepburn (Eds.). (2005). Crossing Design Boundaries, pp.545-549. London: Taylor & Francis Group.  epde_paper.pdf

video stills showing LED output with proximity