Digitally Enchanted Wear

The Bodies of TEI – Investigating Norms and Assumptions in the Design of Embodied Interaction

“…The representation of bodies in technology oriented papers is often as a backdrop; some papers focus so much on the technological and/or theoretical discussions, they represent not a single living/lived body at all [98]. In other papers, the body might be linguistically absent, though ever present (and implicitly gendered in binary normative ways) visually [64]. As I have already mentioned the overt focus on white and light-skinned bodies, it appears almost cynical, that, within the corpus a green body (represented through a fictional avatar) is more easily found [80] than real-world black bodies.…”

“…Technological contributions materialise and (literally) encode further assumptions. While authors mention the importance of attending to the aesthetic qualities of fabrics, including how they feel [99], they do not actively engage with the notion that different people might experience certain fabrics (or wearable constructions more generally [64]) differently. Attending to calibration and adaptation is only ever discussed in the context of non-normative bodyminds [36] without specifying what the concrete normative expectations would be.…”

“…Another assumption can be summarised as "[a]ll participants were male" [46, p.22]. While this is not the case for all papers (and even presumably decidedly not for others, e.g., [64]), conventionally cis-male coded culture as show of force [89], skill [103] or expertise [46] further insinuate the assumption of a (white) cis-male body as expected target group. Authors similarly rarely specify the required skills relevant to engage with a specific technology [47], even if increased diversity of bodyminds engaging with a technology might lead to meaningful insights [84].…”