Oğuz 'Oz' Buruk
Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
Smart-jewelry design has many layers such as comfort, ergonomics, fashionability, interactivity, and functionality that create a complex design process, making the form exploration challenging. Various wearable prototyping tools were developed to overcome this challenge; however, they are usually textile-based and do not target smart jewelry design. To bridge this gap, we developed Snowflakes that differentiates from existing tools by \textit{1) allowing designers to explore different jewelry forms, 2) incorporating external materials such as leather, 3) creating form factors that fit body parts with flexible connectors.} In this paper, we explain the design process of Snowflakes which is inspired by 7 design parameters (limbs, materials, grip, fastener, decoration, placement, form) extracted through the examination of non-smart jewelry. We also demonstrate three reimplementations and design concepts implemented with Snowflakes. Our exploration with Snowflakes contributes to the wearable community in terms of smart-jewelry visual expressions, interaction modalities, and the merger of traditional and computational materials.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445173
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)