The Handbook of Fashion Studies


Book Description

The Handbook of Fashion Studies identifies an innovative spectrum of thematic approaches, key strands and interdisciplinary concepts that continue to push forward the boundaries of fashion studies. The book is divided into seven sections: Fashion, Identity and Difference; Spaces of Fashion; Fashion and Materiality; Fashion, Agency and Policy; Science, Technology and New fashion; Fashion and Time and, Sustainable Fashion in a Globalised world. Each section consists of approximately four essays authored by established researchers in the field from the UK, USA, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada and Australia. The essays are written by international subject specialists who each engage with their section's theme in the light of their own discipline and provide clear case-studies to further knowledge on fashion. This consistency provides clarity and permits comparative analysis. The handbook will be essential reading for students of fashion as well as professionals in the industry.




Design, User Experience, and Usability: Designing Pleasurable Experiences


Book Description

The three-volume set LNCS 10288, 10289, and 10290 constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Design, User Experience, and Usability, DUXU 2017, held as part of the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2017, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, in July 2017, jointly with 14 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1228 papers presented at the HCII 2017 conferences were carefully reviewed and selected from 4340 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of Human-Computer Interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The total of 168 contributions included in the DUXU proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this three-volume set. LNCS 10288: The 56 papers included in this volume are organized in topical sections on design thinking and design philosophy; aesthetics and perception in design; user experience evaluation methods and tools; user centered design in the software development lifecycle; DUXU education and training. LNCS 10289: The 56 papers included in this volume are organized in topical sections on persuasive and emotional design; mobile DUXU; designing the playing experience; designing the virtual, augmented and tangible experience; wearables and fashion technology. LNCS 10290: The 56 papers included in this volume are organized in topical sections on information design; understanding the user; DUXU for children and young users; DUXU for art, culture, tourism and environment; DUXU practice and case studies.




Smart Clothes and Wearable Technology


Book Description

Smart Clothes and Wearable Technology, Second Edition focuses on the design process, material selection, garment construction, and new production techniques for smart clothing. Building on the success of the previous edition, this book brings wearable technologies ever closer to market with its design-led approach to the integration of technologies into textiles. This design-led, cross-disciplinary approach to the development of hybrid processes ensures that results are both attractive and usable to wider audiences. The book will also help designers adapt their product development processes in response to novel textile and garment manufacturing technologies. Case studies showing best practices and warning of pitfalls help the reader develop applications and products in the real world. The differences between testing and design for smart and traditional clothes are also discussed. - Features new chapters on textile processes including knit, weave, print and embroidery for specialist Smart Clothing and footwear applications, as well as for personal protection - Provides an update on current applications and investigates possible future developments in the integration of technology into clothing - Raises important issues around end-of-life and disposal of smart clothing and wearable technologies




Customer's New Voice


Book Description

Find out how to reap the benefits of motivating and engaging the new, direct customer voice The Customer's New Voice shows businesses how to motivate and transform directly volunteered consumer knowledge into profitable insights, enabling a new echelon of marketing relevancy, customer experience, and personalization. With a deep look at the inner workings of how a modern generation of business innovators are tapping into the fresh opportunities with the customer's new voice, this book describes how businesses are transforming "inference-based" predictions of purchase intent with direct consumer knowledge of their actual intentions and buying context. The result: An untouchable/unprecedented level of offer relevancy, experience, and personalized service levels. Those offers range from the most basic app model of "Give me your physical location, we'll find the best Thai restaurant near you, and give you an instant coupon" to a more complex model such as an Electric utility value proposition: "We'll give you discounts to charge your Prius during certain times to help us optimize our grid efficiency while allowing Toyota to monitor and optimize your battery to enable Toyota's R&D and customer experience enhancement." Forty case studies detail proven approaches for directly engaging the new consumer, showing companies how to take advantage of rapidly evolving personal technology—smart phones, homes, vehicles, wearable technology, and Internet of Things—and the new sharing culture to collect the higher value "intentionally/ discretionarily" shared information. Readers gain access to a robust tool set including templates, checklists, tables, flow diagrams, process maps, and technical data schematics to streamline these new capabilities and accelerate implementation of these transformational techniques. Ninety percent of the data that businesses use to determine what they sell or how to personalize a customer experience results from consumers unintentionally volunteering "indirect" data; however, this type of data has less than 10 percent accuracy. This low effectiveness also necessitates up to 70 percent of a business's cost infrastructure. Direct consumer knowledge is now available and boasts up to 20-50 percent accuracy, yet businesses remain anchored in the old "indirect" competencies. This book helps companies integrate compelling sharing motivators and controls for consumers to feel motivated and safe about directly sharing their product and experience desires, providing the ultimate market advantage. Learn how to catch up to the new digitalized consumer Leverage direct consumer information from current megatrends Navigate privacy's current and future metamorphosis Unlock the untapped value of Big Data's true enabler—Little Data Parsing "incidentally" volunteered data has been stagnant for decades due to the capabilities and expectations of a new generation of enabled consumers The timeless reality is that any level of investment in computing power, data, and analytics will never approach their full ROI potential without interfusing the direct, intentional insights from the consumer. If today's forward-thinking companies want to profitably engage the new consumers, they must learn the secrets of motivating and safeguarding this new potential of customer transparency. The risks of not engaging these new consumer voices? Irrelevancy and Silence. The Customer's New Voice shows businesses how to fulfill the promise and caveat of the new consumer: "If you make my life easier, reward me, and respect my shared information: I will tell you my secrets."




Materials that Move


Book Description

This book presents a design-driven investigation into smart materials developed by chemists, physicists, materials and chemical engineers, and applied by designers to consumer products, buildings, interfaces, or textiles. Introducing a class of smart materials (referred to as stimuli-responsive, morphing or kinetic materials) that move and change their shape in response to stimuli, the book presents their characteristics, advantages, potentials, as well as the difficulties involved in their application. The book also presents a large number of case studies on products, projects, concepts, and experiments employing smart materials, thus mapping out new design territories for these innovative materials. The case studies involve different fields of design, including product, interior, fashion, and communication design. Reflecting the growing demand for sustainable and human-centered design agendas, the book explores and reveals the role and influence of these new materials and technologies on design and human experience, and discusses how they can be used to redefine our objects and spaces so as to promote more resilient environments. The book offers an intriguing and valuable resource for design professionals, engineers, scientists and students alike.




Joining Textiles


Book Description

Understanding the techniques for joining fabrics together in a way that considers durability, strength, leak-tightness, comfort in wear and the aesthetics of the joints is critical to the production of successful, structurally secure fabric products. Joining textiles: Principles and applications is an authoritative guide to the key theories and methods used to join fabrics efficiently.Part one provides a clear overview of sewing technology. The mechanics of stitching, sewing and problems related to sewn textiles are discussed, along with mechanisms of sewing machines and intelligent sewing systems. Part two goes on to explore adhesive bonding of textiles, including principles, methods and applications, along with a review of bonding requirements in coating and laminating of textiles. Welding technologies are the focus of part three. Heat sealing, ultrasonic and dielectric textile welding are covered, as are laser seaming of fabrics and the properties and performance of welded or bonded seams. Finally, part four reviews applications of joining textiles such as seams in non-iron shirts and car seat coverings, joining of wearable electronic components and technical textiles, and the joining techniques involved in industrial and medical products including nonwoven materials.With its distinguished editors and international team of expert contributors, Joining textiles is an important reference work for textile product manufacturers, designers and technologists, fibre scientists, textile engineers and academics working in this area. - Provides an authoritative guide to the key theories and methods used to efficiently join fabrics - Discusses the mechanics of stitching and sewing and problems related to sewn textiles, alongside mechanisms of sewing machines, and intelligent sewing systems - Explores adhesive bonding of textiles, including principles, methods and applications, along with a review of bonding requirements in coating and laminating of textiles




Wearing Embodied Emotions


Book Description

Today, people are in an era of digitally mediated Human-to-Human Interaction, which cannot provide full sensorial contact and therefore, emotions cannot be communicated completely. The intimate cover of the human body, i.e. garment is the interface, where many personal traits are embodied. With the improvements in textile and electronics industry, this embodiment can be carried on a higher level, where the garments become dynamic interfaces and extensions of the human body. This book consists of a research on skin, clothes and technology as extensions of human body, emotions, technology-mediated emotions and a design practice that explores the communicative level of wearable technology through turning it into a living surface, which can convert intangible data to tangible in order to provide an emotional communication. This book aims to show how Human-Technology interaction is carried into an alternative context, where technology dissolves in use and starts serving for enhancing HHI.




The Mobile Audience


Book Description

Preliminary Material -- Introduction /Howard Rheingold -- Overview /Martin Rieser -- Pockets of Plenty: An Archaeology of Mobile Media /Erkki Huhtamo -- The Temporal and Spatial Design of Video and Film-based Installation Art in the 60s and 70s: Their Inherent Perception Processes and Effects on the Perceivers' Actions /Susanne Jaschko -- Forgotten Histories of Interactive Space /Martin Rieser -- Art by Telephone: From Static to Mobile Interfaces /Adriana de Souza e Silva -- Mobile/Audience: Thinking the Contradictions /Mary Griffiths and Sean Cubitt -- Towards a Language of Mobile Media /Jon Dovey and Constance Fleuriot -- Snapshots from Curating Mobility: (If you build it, they won't necessarily come) /Beryl Graham -- Beyond Mapping: New Strategies for Meaning in Locative Artworks /Martin Rieser -- Digital Media and Architecture--An Observation /Anke Jacob -- Urban Screens as the Visualization Zone of the City's Invisible Communication Sphere /Mirjam Struppek -- Future Physical: The Creative User and theme of response-ABILITY /Debbi Lander -- 'A Fracture in Reality': Networked Narratives as Imaginary Fields of Action and Dislocation /Andrea Zapp -- What makes mediascapes compelling?:Insights from the Riot! 1831 case-study /Josephine Reid and Richard Hull -- Hopstory: A study in place-based, historically inspired narrative /Valentina Nisi and Glorianna Davenport -- The Media Portrait of Liberties: A Non-linear Community Portrait /Valentina Nisi , Mads Haahr and Glorianna Davenport -- Loca: 'Location Oriented Critical Arts' /Drew Hemment , John Evans , Mika Raento and Theo Humphries -- Invisible Topographies /Usman Haque -- Wifi-Hog: The Battle for Ownership in Public Wireless Space /Jonah Brucker-Cohen -- Puppeteers, Performers or Avatars: A Perceptual Difference in Telematic Space /Paul Sermon -- Mobile Feelings: Wireless Communication of Heartbeat and Breath for Mobile Art /Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau -- The Living Room /Victoria Fang -- tunA and the Power of Proximity /Arianna Bassoli -- Engagement with the Everyday /Margot Jacobs -- Between Improvisation and Publication: Supporting the Creative Metamorphosis with Technology /Cati Vaucelle -- Developing Creative Audience Interaction: Four Projects by Squidsoup. /Anthony Rowe -- The Emotional Wardrobe /Lisa Stead , Petar Goulev , Caroline Evans and Ebrahim Mamdani -- Social Fashioning and Active Conduits /Katherine Moriwaki -- Wunderkammer: Wearables as an Artistic Strategy /Laura Beloff -- Flirt and Mset /Fiona Raby -- Trace, The Choreography of Everyday Movement and Drift /Teri Rueb -- Blast Theory /Matt Adams -- Mixed Reality Lab /Steve Benford -- The Politics of Mobility /Drew Hemment -- Memory-Rich Garments and Social Interaction /Joey Berzowska -- Heart on Your Sleeve /Annie Lovejoy -- Contributor Biographies -- Glossary -- Selected Bibliography Books and Articles.




Functional Aesthetics


Book Description

Functional Aesthetics is a sequel to Seymour's highly acclaimed book "Fashionable Technology" (Springer 2008) and contains new state-of-the art and revealing artistic and design examples focusing on the aesthetic and functional aspects. Chapters like Contextual Prerequisite, Body Sculpture, or Transparent Sustainability provide in-depth studies of often visionary projects seen as stimulation for new developments in the matured field of "Fashionable Technology". The book presents inspiring projects between the poles of fashion, design, technology, and sciences. It includes a list of relevant information on DIY resources, publications, inspirations, etc.




Garments of Paradise


Book Description

A historical and critical view of wearable technologies that considers them as acts of communication in a social landscape. Wearable technology—whether a Walkman in the 1970s, an LED-illuminated gown in the 2000s, or Google Glass today—makes the wearer visible in a technologically literate environment. Twenty years ago, wearable technology reflected cultural preoccupations with cyborgs and augmented reality; today, it reflects our newer needs for mobility and connectedness. In this book, Susan Elizabeth Ryan examines wearable technology as an evolving set of ideas and their contexts, always with an eye on actual wearables—on clothing, dress, and the histories and social relations they represent. She proposes that wearable technologies comprise a pragmatics of enhanced communication in a social landscape. “Garments of paradise” is a reference to wearable technology's promise of physical and mental enhancements. Ryan defines “dress acts”—hybrid acts of communication in which the behavior of wearing is bound up with the materiality of garments and devices—and focuses on the use of digital technology as part of such systems of meaning. She connects the ideas of dress and technology historically, in terms of major discourses of art and culture, and in terms of mass media and media culture, citing such thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Manuel De Landa, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. She examines the early history of wearable technology as it emerged in research labs; the impact of ubiquitous and affective approaches to computing; interaction design and the idea of wearable technology as a language of embodied technology; and the influence of open source ideology. Finally, she considers the future, as wearing technologies becomes an increasingly naturalized aspect of our social behavior.




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