Integrating Wearable Technologies in the Performing Arts: A Holistic Approach to Interactive Costuming

Interactive costumes are technology-enhanced stage clothing that respond to their wearers or to the environment; for example, a tutu with an embedded motion sensor and light that reacts to a dancer’s movements. Performances have used interactive costumes since usable technologies became available in the late 19th century. Since then, the ex-ploration of unusual materials for costume design and technologies that can be worn by the performing body has often been linked to an artistic interest in studying new ways of narration and expressivity. This suggests that interactive costumes have con-siderable potential for performance and costume design and will become a necessity for performance practitioners who seek to leverage such new, narrative, and expres-sive possibilities.
Although wearable and e-textile technologies are more mature today, and interactive costumes are more widely accessible to different types of performances, they are rarely seen outside a few avantgarde projects. There is still no integrated element of perfor-mances that seeks to determine innovative ways of narrative expression and artistic statement. Previous research on interactive costumes has concerned specific aspects, such as their expressive features, the design process or the audience’s perception, but has neglected to examine them broadly or to take traditional costuming and processes into account. In contrast to prior research, this research project aimed for a holistic understanding of interactive costumes in context, including the whole ecology of a performance production and the stakeholders concerned. It also aimed to enable tra-ditionally organised productions to leverage this type of performance costume as a new tool for expressivity and narration.
A holistic approach enables the identification of what facilitates the integration of interactive costumes in the performing arts (main research question). To arrive at such a general per-spective, I drew on Niklas Luhmann’s system theory to guide my investigations of in-teractive costumes on three levels – the dimensions of object, social and time. These di-mensions enabled me to address the characteristics of interactive costumes’ creation and deployment (object dimension); the perception of and impacts on wearers and other stakeholders (social dimension); and the ideal temporal structures required for the processes behind interactive costumes (time dimension).
Engaging with interactive costuming through 10 case studies and 13 expert interviews en-riched this research with first-hand experience of designing and staging interactive costumes and the reflective perspectives of other interactive costume professionals. The qualitative inquiries were driven by an abductive approach. The included case studies served as a resource of practical exploration and combined research through de-sign with action research. They covered different types of interactive technologies in dance and theatre, were conducted in a lab or in the field, based on a variety of meth-ods, and carried out in close collaboration with performance professionals. My own involvement as a designer, teacher, and consultant in interactive costuming was im-portant to be able to understand interactive costuming from a first-hand perspective. The 13 expert interviews complemented my perspective as they provided an inde-pendent professional viewpoint on interactive costuming. The interviewees were in-ternational designers, engineers, researchers, or choreographers with professional expe-rience of interactive costume creation and deployment in different performance pro-jects. Together with the case studies, the expert interviews underwent a qualitative meta-synthesis, to consolidate my personal experience with the professionals’ experienc-es and to comprehensively understand interactive costuming.
With its four publications that address different aspects of interactive costuming, this dissertation constructs new knowledge on the practices, stakeholders, and processes of interactive costumes in the context of the performing arts. First, I explored the chal-lenges in interactive costuming and identified the research gap (Publication 1). Then I examined the design space of interactive costumes in the performing arts (Publication 2) and specified the expertise needed for their creation (Publication 3). I also investi-gated how stakeholders adapt to interactive costuming, particularly during the de-ployment phase (Publication 4). Finally, the results of the meta-synthesis provided a comprehensive picture of what facilitates the integration of interactive costumes in the performing arts and contributes to the philosophy of interactive costuming:
1) In the object dimension, the creation of interactive costumes required the meaningful combination of materials that were new to costume design, with related processing techniques, transdisciplinary knowledge, and participatory activities. The deployment of interactive costumes was dynamically interwoven into their creation process, and rehearsing was key to successful design and deployment.
2) In the social dimension, I defined three types of interactive costume stakeholder: crea-tors, users and enablers. The impact of interactive costumes on these stakeholders seemed to be stronger than that of conventional ones, and differed according to the embodied interactive features and the stakeholders’ backgrounds. Further, all the stakeholders had to share their expertise and ownership through close transdisciplinary collaboration in designing, staging, and sustaining these costumes.
3) In the time dimension, I concluded that interactive costumes required more flexible processes and schedules than traditional performance productions usually do. Ideal temporal structures would enable practical design experiments to begin earlier and provide different resolutions of interactive costume prototypes throughout the whole rehearsal period.
The core insight of this research concerned the relational nature of interactive costumes. On the one hand, the interactive costumes determined how practices unfolded, stake-holders acted, and timings occurred. On the other hand, the creation and deployment of interactive costumes was strongly impacted by existing practices, stakeholders’ ex-pertise and set timings. If the interplay of all these aspects is balanced, interactive cos-tumes can enrich the performance outcome, and vice versa, a performance production can leverage the full potential of e-textile and wearable technologies. In this sense, interactive costuming is not merely the attachment of technologies to conventional costumes which are then given to performers who are trained to wear any type of garment. Interactive costuming requires early consideration of the conceptual and or-ganizational possibilities that can be embodied into interactive costumes and the per-formance production related to them; based on the materials, knowledge and practices inherent to e-textiles and wearable technologies; by engaging from a first-person per-spective and collaborating with different stakeholders that may be both affected by and affect interactive costumes when designing, staging, and sustaining a performance.
Although largely confirming recent research on costume and performance design, my findings also suggest that traditional expertise and education in costuming requires extension through knowledge and skills in e-textiles and wearable technologies, inter-action design, and engineering, to meet the contemporary standards in the field of fashion. Beyond contributing theoretical and practical knowledge on interactive cos-tuming to the research and practice of costume and performance design, my research also contributes theoretical insights into and a methodological example for design re-search and design-oriented human-computer interaction in general. General theoreti-cal contributions are mainly coupled with considerations of the experience of designing and the design of experiences. These insights may be transferrable to other professional application fields in which tangible or wearable products embody interactivity through the means of technology. In addition, my methodological approach may act as inspira-tion for other researchers and designers to study interactive technologies in highly spe-cialised and difficult-to-access areas. The three systemic dimensions of meaning thus serve as a lens to cope with complex transdisciplinary design challenges.