For the last seven weeks, I have been living in England. As part of my PhD project, I did an Erasmus Traineeship at Nottingham Trent University – School of Art and Design, and last week I payed a visit to Northumbria University, in Newcastle.
These lovely ladies are Jayne Wallace and Nantia, PhD student of Jayne.
In both places, I met state of the art researchers, in the field that I am now wandering: Accessories.
Spending the last couple of days in London, I am trying to connect with others, who are in the same field. One of them is Yulia Silina, who did a paper for the ISWC conference last year in Osaka, Japan – together with Hamed Hadaddi on jewellery-like wearables. What they discovered, from examining 187 wearables on the market, or in phases of research and development, was how unfashionable and gadgetry these appeared. Another fact, from their study, was that the field of healthcare and wearable technology, is not benefitting from the matters of fashion.
That’s exactly the point I am looking into in my PhD project. My hypothesis is that the accessory as a platform, will be able to bridge technology and aesthetics as well as enable comfortable experience of wearing health technology closely to the body.
If you are interested in these matters- do not hesitate to contact me. Sharing my ideas and thoughts with Sarah Kettley at Nottingham Trent University the recent weeks, has led us to propose an objective for a research network – we initially chose to call “Accessories to Health”. We are sending an AHRC-application this spring, and I can’t wait to do some more work to broaden the research network!
