Fashion Wearable Between Science and Design, From the Product to an Overall User Experience

The purpose of the research is to develop a fashion wearable design methodology that could potentially embody authenticity. The paper first indicates and analyses the limits of wearable technologies here intended not only as products, but also as a systemic and procedural dimension offered by a design-oriented approach. A market analysis and a literature review had been conducted to provide the theoretical framework needed for a practice-driven inquiry into the design process. Starting from the limits of wearables, the experimentations on the methodology to design wearable devices run by Politecnico di Milano with EPFL + ECAL Lab gather 4 workshops and 2 industrial partnerships over 3 year. The findings offer the opportunity to reinterpret the design process and the interaction that designer have with areas such as art, technology and science. They lead to redefine both the design processes concerning the very meaning of the object and the interaction between human, object and context. The results of these experiments are presented in the form of an advanced methodology to design wearables and the value of this approach leads to an emphasis of the designer’s cross role and it can provide significant social and practical implications both in the academic research and in the market.