ABSTRACT

Wearable technologies are increasing both in number and variety enabling new ways for collecting personal data, as well as novel interaction modalities. Even though the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has widely explored the potential applications of wearables, its theoretical contribution on this research field has been far from impressive. Most scholars and designers seem to rely on a series of dominant assumptions that look at wearables “from the outside” by focusing on their “external properties.” When these assumptions are fully embraced at design-time, however, they may cloud opportunities for designing for the “internal aspects” of our everyday experience. In this article, I propose a theory that looks at wearables “from the inside,”giving a theoretical backdrop to all those wearable designs that pay attention to the internal aspects of interaction. By adopting a postphenomenological approach, I conceptualize wearable devices as “extensions” of our intentionality and introduce the “extension relation” to explain how wearables may alter how we relate to the world. In doing so, I propose a series of design considerations that aim to trace future research lines for all those wearables that are currently designed from an “externalistic” perspective.

摘要

可穿戴技术在数量和种类上都在增加，为收集个人数据以及新颖的交互方式提供了新的方式。尽管人机交互 (HCI) 社区已经广泛探索了可穿戴设备的潜在应用，但其在该研究领域的理论贡献却远非令人印象深刻。大多数学者和设计师似乎都依赖于一系列主导假设，这些假设通过关注可穿戴设备的“外部特性”来“从外部”看待可穿戴设备。然而，当这些假设在设计时被完全接受时，它们可能会掩盖为我们日常体验的“内部方面”进行设计的机会。在这篇文章中，我提出了一个“从内部、“为所有注重交互内部方面的可穿戴设计提供理论背景。通过采用后现象学方法，我将可穿戴设备概念化为我们意向性的“延伸”，并引入“延伸关系”来解释可穿戴设备如何改变我们与世界的关系。在此过程中，我提出了一系列设计考虑，旨在追踪目前从“外在主义”角度设计的所有可穿戴设备的未来研究路线。