The Design and Emotion Workshop was an amazing experience! We would like to thank once again the METU ODTU, Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Design and Emotion Society, the organizing Committee from Industrial Design and Architecture Department: Aren Kartgozu, Gulay Hasdogan, Naz Evyapan, and Fatma Korkut, and of course the energetic and inventive participants!

The workshop aims to create a dynamic community of design, art and wearable computing practitioners, and share knowledge between them. We hope to cultivate interest in Interaction Design through wearable computing examples to be worn in everyday life. The Design and Emotion Workshop had a 5-hour duration divided along the three conference days, in 2-hour evening sessions, and a 1-hour presentation session to show the workshop results. The participants developed Wearables to Communicate projects, with the aim to rescue wearable computing from the 80’s cybersuit stereotype.

The participants learned the basics of participatory design, user centered design, service design, body storming, fast prototyping techniques, and to work in a multidisciplinary group. The workshop wasn’t of course meant to be exhaustive of these methodologies but to make participants interested in learning more about it afterwards.

Participants designed prototypes of wearable interfaces based on the theme of opposites to create dynamic social communication through clothes to be used while on the move that make the wearers look uglier or more beautiful, spooky or calming, communicate love or hate.

Participants were designers at professional level willing to expand their knowledge to the wearable computing area, graduate students in interaction design, business professionals in advanced technology fields willing to expand their research and development department, and students or professionals from the cognitive psychology, narrative, arts, fashion design areas. We enjoy to create a balanced mix of engineers, designers, artists, sociologists, computer scientists and happy people.

A multidisciplinary group is key to the workshop success.

Participants worked in groups in order to facilitate knowledge exchange and learn multidisciplinary brainstorming techniques. They brought old clothes, add-ons and accessories, electronic gadgets to disassemble, merging existing technologies to invent new ones, plus digital cameras and their laptops to document their progress.

The results were presented on the last day of the Design and Emotion Conference, 14 July 2004, Wednesday, from 6 to 7 pm, during the Showtime! The participants in project teams had 5 minutes each to show their work, and 5 minutes of Question and Answers from the audience. At the end of their short scenario presentation the participants concluded with a Wearables Fashion Show that you can see in the videoclip.