Emotionally charged: A practice-centred enquiry of digital jewellery and personal emotional significance

Abstract

The aim of this research was to explore the possible integration of digital technologies and contemporary jewellery towards the development of digital jewellery; jewellery objects embedded with electronic components. I sought to investigate the relevancies and appropriateness of such integration as extensions of contemporary jewellery through personally and emotionally significant experience. A critical contextual review reveals that wearable digital objects are fast emerging phenomena, but that the majority of existing approaches to their development, both conceptual and physical, are from outside the field of contemporary jewellery. In consequence the majority of developments commonly miss many of the subtleties and dynamics of what contemporary jewellery can be. Notable differences relate to interpretations of the aesthetics of jewellery, the relationship jewellery may have with the body and the role jewellery may play within human relationships. This critique is extended through the notion of the gadget. Current approaches to the design of wearable digital objects are led chiefly by an opportunistic use of the body as a mobile location serving to satisfy an increasing desire for ubiquitous computing. Such approaches encourage interpretations of digital objects as function led devices that have a transferable significance, are part of a fast paced consumption cycle and neglect considerations of emotionally rich interactions between people and digital objects. I have developed a practice-centred methodology rooted in craft practice that tests the appropriateness of contemporary jewellery practice as a creative strategy and research tool in the development of personal and emotionally significant digital jewellery. My process focuses on the involvement of individual participants with the aim of weaving aspects of their personal histories that are emotionally meaningful to them into pieces of digital jewellery. Innovative methods (stimuli) draw on methods from Interaction Design and atypical approaches to contemporary jewellery practice to facilitate contemporary jewellery practice as a directly social activity. In addition the research develops a perspective of the interconnected sensibilities within craft practice, of beauty, enchantment and empathy that enable it to offer an approach centred on the social and discursive elements of emotion. The participants responses to the digital jewellery proposals reveal insights into opposing expectations and assumptions of digital objects and jewellery objects and also how the digital jewellery proposals were interpreted and appropriated in a personally emotionally significant context. Additional insights are revealed relating to perceptions of jewellery as intensely personal types of objects, strong connections between participants inter-personal human relationships and their personal criteria for beauty and to shifts between how the participants referred to the pieces as personal or shared experiences depending on whether they regarded them as a piece of digital or non-digital jewellery. The research culminates in a body of work, both physical and conceptual that has relevance for both design and theory. Contributions to knowledge are claimed in the following areas: The novelty of the investigation to explore the relevancies and appropriateness of digital jewellery for personally and emotionally significant experience. The identification that the highly prescriptive and limited nature of existing approaches to digital objects limit our experiences as well as our expectations and assumptions of what digital can be. The characterisation of jewellery as a particular, intimate form of object that has a strong role within our developing sense of self and within meaningful and personal human relationships. And the utilisation of jewellery as a vehicle through which to explore the potential for digital objects to have a meaningful and personally significant context. The extension of contemporary jewellery practice through this utilisation; through creating a characterisation of contemporary jewellery practice as a process centred on emotion as social, discursive and human-relational; and through a hybrid methodology, where jewellery and craft processes integrated methods from HCI. The creation of a reflective view of craft practice as an innovative, empathic creative strategy relating strongly to beauty, which identifies the value of craft practice to a digital culture. The resulting series of physical jewellery objects that are both physical and conceptual propositions of digital jewellery. They act as challenges and alternatives to current assumptions of digital qualities and demonstrate that digital jewellery may be personally meaningful and have a different pace and texture to current digital objects. Each individual piece proposes a different class of object. The identification of the following from the participants responses: strong connections between inter-personal relationships and a personal criteria for beauty: shifts in their perceptions of jewellery from personal (non-digital) to shared with an intimate group of people (digital): complex tensions around the idea of digital jewellery that related to assumptions of materials, aesthetics, functionality, status of object and lifespan.