Art Digital Jewellery: Practitioners' Perspectives

Abstract

We introduce the term 'Art Digital Jewellery' as a label for craft-oriented, bespoke approaches to embedding electronics in jewellery. These unconventional digital-physical jewellery practices struggle for attention compared with higher profile, often more mass-production oriented wearables. This is partly because discourses articulating and critiquing these experimental practices are scarce and obscure to HCI researchers. To address this, we describe how these artistic practices arose from earlier fashion movements and we engaged six leading creative practitioners in a structured and iterative dialogue. Analysis of our adapted Delphi survey suggests that core to Art Digital Jewellery is very individualised design processes and creating artefacts which are highly personal in terms of their form, their materials, their narratives and their interactivity. An appreciation of these unique practices may enrich perspectives on designing wearables, marrying craft with technology, and personalisation of experiences.