Event Title
FSM07 - A Database for Embodied Technology
Location
CB1-212
Start Date
3-11-2017 11:15 AM
Description
This talk explains how the push for innovation in the wearables market introduces several sociotechnical problems, including greater uncertainty about future efficiency trade-offs and the need to uncover and track them. Using Vandrico Inc.'s popular Wearables Database as a case study, we frame the current wearables market as an innovation-driven industry whose main goal is to achieve greater efficiency in areas of life and activity. We introduce the concept of embodied technology to describe emerging varieties of body-centered computing excluded from the Vandrico database and explain the emergence of FABRIC, a novel database we constructed over the course of a federally funded, multiyear research project for tracking the evolution embodied technologies over time. FABRIC consists of multimedia related to the embodied technologies market – including patents, instructional videos, and articles – that are sorted using a custom metadata framework, featuring user-curated collections on sociotechnical problems relating to embodied technologies. We end by explaining how FABRIC provides a critical alternative database for studying embodied technologies, their trade-offs, users, and developers.
FSM07 - A Database for Embodied Technology
CB1-212
This talk explains how the push for innovation in the wearables market introduces several sociotechnical problems, including greater uncertainty about future efficiency trade-offs and the need to uncover and track them.
