Adorned in Memes: Exploring the Adoption of Social Wearables in Nordic Student Culture
0Adorned in Memes: Exploring the Adoption of Social Wearables in Nordic Student Culture
Felix Anand Epp, Anna Kantosalo, Nehal Jain, Andrés Lucero, Elisa D Mekler
CHI'22: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Session: Out and About
Abstract
Social wearables promise to augment and enhance social interactions. However, despite two decades of HCI research on wearables, we have not seen widespread adoption of social wearables into everyday life. More in-situ investigations into the social dynamics and cultural practices afforded by wearing interactive technology are needed to understand drivers and barriers to adoption. To this end, we study social wearables in the context of Nordic student culture and their practice of adorning boiler suits. Through a co-creation process, we designed Digi Merkki, a personalised interactive clothing patch. In a two-week field intervention, we captured how 16 students adopted Digi Merkki in their social practices. We found that Digi Merkki afforded various social interaction strategies, including sharing, spamming, and stealing pictures, which supported meaning-making and community-building. Based on our findings, we propose ”memetic expression” as a strong concept for designing social wearables.
WEB:: https://chi2022.acm.org/
Pre-recorded presentations of CHI 2022