We have all experienced it: we go to introduce ourselves to someone new, only to learn that the person remembers us quite distinctly! How embarrassing! Or its milder cousin: we recognize someone but fail to recall their name, occupation, or the context in which we originally met them. Do we go re-introduce ourselves? How do we overcome the awkwardness of this scenario?
I was part of a 3-person project team this quarter (Spring 2009) that tried to design a solution for this problem. Our “Social Shirt” prototype is intended to mitigate the awkwardness during social interactions with people who we don’t remember well or with distant acquaintances. It presents relevant information to the user through an LCD embedded in the fabric of a shirt near the wrist, which we found may referenced with minimal interruption during a normal conversation. We describe our data collection and prototyping (research and design) process in this report and in the video below.
The Social Shirt: Memory On Your Sleeve from Brynn Evans on Vimeo.
One Comment
Really interesting concept. Wonder what would prompt the information call and recognition. It also reminded me of the Nokia 888 future phone design from 2005 (http://www.yankodesign.com/2005/09/30/nokia-888-mobile-phone-by-tamer-nakisci/). Wouldn’t it make more sense to create this as a device, as opposed to a single shirt? But definitely on the inside of the wrist is a great spot (it’s how I used to wear my watch to surreptitiously check the time during meetings).
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[...] framed all of my projects that year: the NetLogo simulation of question-answering behavior, the social shirt project, my involvement with the betacup initiative, my continued writings and talks about social [...]
[...] My latest blog post for HBR is an interview with digital anthropologist Brynn Evans. One of Brynn’s research projects was The Social Shirt: [...]