Taking wearable technologies as a slow but inevitable shift in our life, Disobedient Wearables in a design attempt to anticipate upcoming controversies of the social and cultural impacts of these connected pieces strapped to us. The project tries to tie together new narratives including chunks of the mundane messiness of the world, taking wearables out of their comfort zone, for a tour far away from startups pitches and tech-savvy markets.

Our uncanny wearables are designed to question us about how our systems evolve.

As Disobedient Wearables moves from our classical approach of wearable, the project ambitions to readdressing wearables criticised characteristics, such as the black box effect, to tackle social issues. Exploring ongoing debates, Disobedient Wearables consider the questions of data ownership, privacy, persuasive powers of connected devices and willing consent to constant connection.

By questioning their redundant promises and exploring their untold purposes, Disobedient Wearables is structured to build new perspectives of development of wearables aware of the complex issues they are about to deal with. How would they interact with social issues and cultural changes? How can they lead to social marginalisation as well as inclusion? How they finally reach the invisible public?

Disobedient Wearables caustic-but-plausible visions are meant to be understood as a food for thoughts, provides matter for critical discussions, without illusions. Building on the posture of critical design fiction, Disobedient Wearables is nothing more than a conversation starter and especially not a blueprint for possible innovations. The undesirable visions are designed to be addressed to the players of the wearable industry such as engineers, designers, decision makers or any innovation consultancy.

Disobedient Wearables is also an endeavour to define what could be an open design fiction process. It aims to create a complementary approach between toolkits, participatory events and design productions, within a same project, about a common theme. By involving people in our process, releasing assets and documenting methods as well as gathered feedback, we seek to allow others to build and iterate on our visions.

Disobedient Wearables was inspired by the V&A “Disobedient objects” exhibition.

We have designed the scenarios from Disobedient Wearables to trigger questions and provoke thoughts. We are interested in documenting the perspectives shaken by these uncanny perspectives. That is why we invite you to share your reactions and criticisms in the comment section of the project pages or by sending us an e-mail (info{@}design-friction{.com}, without brackets).
We extend the invitation to build new design fictions with our toolkit, iterate on the original scenarios with alternative points of view or define counter-narratives disobeying to our propositions.

Design Friction is a design practice working on speculative scenarios and critical experiences, run by Estelle Hary, Bastien Kerspern and Léa Lippera.
Through design fiction, we explore social, cultural and technological transformations of our societies, to deconstruct realities to build new perspectives.

We would like to warmly thank all the contributors to this project:
Julian Loïs, Morgane Boileau, Rebecca Oziol, Casus Ludi, our friends from Hong Kong and the workshop participants.