After going to Dr. Yvonne Forester’s presentation, “Designing Future Bodies: Fashion and Technology”, for the first time in my life I realized that clothing is “technology”. My idea of technology had always been something cold, hard, and mechanical, and I now realize that that conception is born almost entirely out of the modern digital age. There are very obvious fashion technologies that fall in line with this image such as the Apple Watch, but Dr. Forester also offered some other bits such as temperature moderating cloth.
I realized that like clothes, we can see technology as an extension of ourselves. In some ways nakedness can make one feel less human and more animal. Our humanness is often characterized by these ingenious inventions which account for the limits of our physical body. A sweater serves the purpose of retaining and producing warmth and clothing in the future might perform that same task but in a more advanced way.
The conversation about the Apple watch and the Fitbit again brought up the ethical dilemma of data privacy. Now your computer doesn’t just have information on what you think, and what you like, it can now gather large amounts of data on your physical state. It can monitor your mood through your pulse and perhaps in the future be used to create specific sorts of experiences tailored directly to your emotional state.
All of this made me wonder, what is our responsibility to ourselves if even our clothing might one day do all of this for us. Where do we begin to claim our experience of our minds and our bodies when there is tech that may very well know us better than we know ourselves in the form of blood pressure and beats per minute. I will never be gathering as much data about myself as my computer is. At some point will the computer be able to tell me who I am physically and mentally better than I can tell myself.
Dr. Forester brought up the phrase “the quantified self” and I’m starting to grasp that through algorithms and data collection my technology is able to experience me in a quantified form. I know that I do not understand myself or conceive of myself in a quantified state so my computer or my Apple Watch are the objects which have access to that form of me, to the patterns that I would never be able to see.
