This garment exists within a future scenario that involves the capacity of embedded technology to perform predictive services based on bodily signals. This is a speculative future in which garments act as machine-body interfaces that perform behavior monitoring and learning in recurring situations in order to understand user intentionality in specific scenarios. The potential of wearable sensors to collect signals such as changes in hormones, heart rate, or sweat levels, as well as movements such as changes in posture or fidgeting, would allow a common location context to be inferred as a common situation by detecting recurring symptoms for a user (repeated physical manifestations of a particular mood state). A combination of user prompts and/or cues and machine learning capabilities would serve to isolate situational responses and activate predictive services in specific locations/ in response to biometric data. 

Although these sensors would be actively collecting data and learning from it, this project involves an exploration of how this kind of tech might be integrated into a garment in such a way where its exposure would be entirely in response to a user’s prompt. In a future where wearable technology has the potential to provide predictive services in response to biometric data, there raises the question of preserving agency and spontaneity, human qualities that have the potential to erode under constant access to a prognostic database. 

Through the use of thermochromic pigment and mesh fabric I explored the act of revealing embedded technology using body heat, a resource that is inherent to the body’s natural state at all times.  

Projects which inspired this work included the Levi’s Commuter Jacket, an item designed in partnership with Project Jacquard by Google. The fabric used to construct the garment is embedded with thin conductive metal alloys combined with natural and synthetic fibers that can be reliably communicate with embedded electronics. Jacquard provides an innovative wearable experience because the computing woven into its fibers can respond to touch gestures applied directly to the fabric’s surface and will perform different functions based on interaction type. The associated app allows users to customize the garment by assigning different abilities to gestures. My project evolved to incorporate location-awareness and wayfinding but the responsive nature of fabric introduced to me through project Jacquard was my initial inspiration to explore this concept.