Art Digital Jewellery: Practitioners' Perspectives
Digital Jewellery is created by individual practitioners who combine art, craft and design skills with electronics. Understandings of these practices are fragmented as the different commentators and creators draw upon different traditions from a diversity of artistic, fashion, engineering and participatory design approaches. It is difficult to develop a synthesis of different perspectives as their abilities, inspiration, motivations, methods, materials and techniques are idiosyncratic. To address this, I engaged six leading digital jewellers in a structured and iterative dialogue to establish a collective understanding of their approaches and attitudes. I adapted the Delphi Method and used examples of digital jewellery from my practice to provoke conversation.
The following three questions were posed, one in each round:
Q.1: Digital devices on the body, widely known as wearables, wearable technology and wearable devices are available in the market for some time now and offer a range of applications. What do you think differentiates a wearable device (to use a reference term) from a piece of Digital Jewellery? Q.2: What qualities of the pieces Togetherness: Anthos & Chronos, Microcosmos, Travelling with the Sea and Topoi (if any), do you think are meaningful for Digital Jewellery? Q.3: What can digital technology do for Contemporary Jewellery, if anything, that no other technology can?
At the end of the process, all the questions (with their answers) were sent back to the experts in a visual document. Following the three rounds of questions and shared discussion, there was an optional informal fourth stage of the process where the participants wrote to describe areas that they are interested to explore in the future. This allowed them to see each other’s concerns and research interests.
Koulidou, K., & Mitchell, R. (2021). Art Digital Jewellery: Practitioners’ Perspectives. In Wimmer, R. (Ed.) Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI2021), Salzburg, Austria, 14 February 2021 - 19 February 2021 (pp. 1-11).
Abstract We introduce the term Art Digital Jewellery as a label for craft-oriented, bespoke approaches to embedding electronics in jewellery. These unconventional digital-physical jewellery practices struggle for attention compared with higher profile, often more mass-production oriented wearables. This is partly because discourses articulating and critiquing these experimental practices are scarce and obscure to HCI researchers. To address this, we describe how these artistic practices arose from earlier fashion movements and we engaged six leading creative practitioners in a structured and iterative dialogue. Analysis of our adapted Delphi survey suggests that core to Art Digital Jewellery is very individualised design processes and creating artefacts which are highly personal in terms of their form, their materials, their narratives and their interactivity. An appreciation of these unique practices may enrich perspectives on designing wearables, marrying craft with technology, and personalisation of experiences.
