Wearable technology and smart materials

Introduction

This post traces a journey from the diminished prestige of dance since the French and Industrial Revolutions, through the subsequent loss of physical awareness, memory, and intelligence in society, to the recent rise of wearable technology. It highlights how it’s no coincidence that robotics and AI have helped reinstate the body, dance and the tangible to their rightful place in human life.

  • The first section takes a historical journey of the rejection of the body in Western European culture.
  • The second section explores neuroscience discoveries that the human brain is not for thinking but for controlling movement.
  • The third section discusses human relationships with machines, examining communication as a desire to be seduced and transformed, and technology as a medium to create the necessary distance for seduction to exist.

The rejection of the body and dance in Western European culture

The instrument of dance is the body. In the old greek times dance was viewed as a multisensory stimulations of mind and body which called attention to the potency of dance to express and transform emotions and feelings.

With the arrival of Church love-hate relation to the body: Christ was God’s creation made of flesh, yet the body was implicated in sin, for about 2000 years the body was deemed as the enemy of spiritual. The persuasive notion was that a human is essentially a soul imprisoned in a body. The rejection of the body reflects the inability to come to terms with the passing of time and death. If humans are not bodies they become immortals.

During Louis XIV’s reign, dance was the epitome of royal male performance, embodying the grandeur and cultural significance of the time. However, the aftermath of the French Revolution marked a drastic shift. Dance lost its importance and prestige, and the body became perceived as an adversary of economic productivity. This change was largely due to the emergent French bourgeoisie, who attributed the collapsed of french monarchy in part to the moral laxity. Consequently, they transformed the body from an instrument of pleasure into one of production. The same attitudes developed with the rise of protestantism and the Industrial Revolution in England.

It’s crucial to understand the role of self-control, specifically the control of the body, in this historical context. If people lose the ability to control their bodies, as offered by disciplines like dance, they also become more susceptible to external programming and influence. This vulnerability was manipulated through a negative narrative surrounding dance, strategically used by the middle class to consolidate and protect their power. The marginalization of dance and bodily expression served as a tool to suppress individual autonomy and maintain societal control during the profound socio-economic transformations in England, paralleling those in France.

It’s also interesting to note that since dance lost its prestige becaming associated with moral laxity, dance moved from the epitome of royal male performance to the nadir of inferior female performance.

Neuroscience: the reason for brains is movement control

While the technosphere has homogenized bodies to the point that today we have lost all perception of the body, it seems robots and machines hold instead the memory that before living in society, we live in our bodies.

The field of neuroscience researching how to teach machines to be human, has discovered that the human brain is so developed not for thinking but to control movement.
Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world, whether foraging for food or attracting a waiter’s attention. All communication, including speech, sign language, gestures and writing, is mediated via the motor system. Ultimately movement is what forges human identities.

In Daniel Wolpert words: «You may reason that we have brains to perceive the world or to think, and that’s completely wrong. The brain evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement. Furthermore, to understand movement is to understand the whole brain. And therefore it’s important to remember when you are studying memory, cognition, sensory processing, they’re there for a reason, and that reason is action.

2006: The Year the Smartphone Arrived and the Wearable Journey Began


The advent of the modern smartphone revolutionized our interaction with technology, offering new ways to ‘fly’ through space via maps and video conferencing, ‘travel’ through time with photos and social networks, and expand our access to information with constant internet connectivity. Wearables are poised to be ‘more literal extensions’ of these capabilities, enhancing physical coordination, augmenting hearing, and more. It’s the pursuit of these augmented physical abilities that will drive user adoption. Unlike gadgets that primarily stimulate the mind, wearables are designed to synergize mind and body. This connection will pave the way for technology that goes beyond just conveying information, instead fostering communication and transformation.

Short history of wearables:

Up until this point, wearable technology has been stuck in the information age.
Our devices have counted our steps, measured our heart rates and brain waves, and tracked everything from our sleep habits to our breathing patterns. This data-focused phenomenon, known as «The Quantified Self,» was crystallised by Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, when they coined the term in 2007.

The rush to translate the human body into data sets that can be processed by our machines has resulted in an explosion of hardware devices – many of which do the same thing and aren’t always that technologically interesting.

A correlation between the evolution of the internet and the one of wearables can be made. First there was The Information Age marked by «increasing efficiency in the dissemination of information via the internet from producer to consumer.» Then it followed, the Social Age which is marked by «a fundamental change in the way we communicate and socialise.»

This model can be useful in thinking about the evolution of wearables. The wearable technology we’ve seen up until this point belongs to a kind of Information Age – data-driven, aiming to be as efficient as possible and primarily one-to-one in its focus to deliver wearers information about their bodies.

The next wave of wearables promises to usher in a Social Age, which is not marked by a movement away from information, but towards communication and self-expression.

Definition of Smart Materials:


For a discussion of the present/future of wearables we need a definition of Smart Materials and to understand what is meant by Smart behaviour.

«Smart behaviour» is the reaction of a material to some change in its environment, sense some stimulus from its environment and react to it to actuate a useful, reliable, reproducible and usually reversible response. At this point is when we realise two points: no material can be Smart in isolation. Smart qualities comes from being part of a structure or system. 
Most of all so called smart wearables produced, during the Quantified self period, failed to fulfill the definition, of smart.
Understanding this interaction within a system naturally leads us to the concept of communication within these structures. But how is communication defined in this context?»

To be part of a system and the meaning of communication

In discussing systems and structures, we must consider the nature of communication within the system. Communication is more about transformation than mere information exchange; it occurs when participants transform each other through the transference of information, as described by Weaver in 1939. While smart materials can exchange information, truly intelligent ones possess the ability to communicate.
This brings us to a pivotal inquiry: if transformation is the essence of communication, how can we develop materials capable of such interaction? The key lies not in the ‘how’ but in understanding the ‘why’ behind communication.

Communicative materials development: in the why we find the how

Transformation is the measure of communication, but how can be built materials that can communicate? When it cames to communication, asking how is the wrong question to start with. The journey to creating communicative materials begins with understanding the motivations behind communication. This journey will lead to answer the how question.
If transformation is the goal, then the driving force of communication can be seen as the desire to be seduced into transformation.

Seduction and the power of vulnerability

Understanding the process of seduction gives insights into how materials can be designed to communicate effectively. This means recognizing that to seduce involves appearing vulnerable, thus enabling approachability and interaction. Vulnerability, being reachable, act upon and touched, is essential for true communication. While it can be perceived as weakness, without vulnerability there cannot be communication and is, paradoxically, a strength in the context of smart materials.

From mechanical Metaphors to Dynamic Identities: The Future of Wearable Technology»

Since the invention of the clock, the archetype of mechanical machines, people no longer eat when they are hungry, but when it is dinner time. They no longer sleep when they are tired, but when it is time to go to bed. The example of the clock illustrates that humans are inherently computable machines, that behave and adjust according to the mechanical metaphor they visualize.

While humans are computable machines. Yet, human identity is not static; it’s constantly evolving. This evolution brings about a struggle to keep up, caught between outdated programs and the need to update these to fit the demands and changes of the present. In response to this struggle, a new desire has emerged within the realm of wearable technology.

The future, human desire for wearable technology is to evolve into ‘Rebel Machines/Subversive Bodies’ – tools that encourage us to break free from obsolete patterns, unlearn automated behaviors, and align with the dynamic nature of our true selves.

Conclusion: the future is in dancing materials

While the suppression of the body by religion and cultural changes during the French and Industrial Revolutions led to a decline in the importance of dance and physical activities, which in turn resulted in the deterioration of cognitive and social functions, recent advancements in robotics and AI have confirmed what the greeks said all along. They key to create really smart materials is understanding movement and communication in a system. The origin of intelligence and clear thinking is in movement control.
The discipline busy with the coordination and communication between parts to move is dance.

This suggests that when the wearable industry will achieve materials that can dance, smart materials will be able to become intelligent and thus interact, support, and communicate with the wearer’s body.

Dancing textiles will allow algorithms and functionalities to work together in symbiosis with the body.