Wear.x: Developing Wearables that Embody Felt Experience

Physical discomfort can be highly personal, difficult to discern from the outside, challenging to effectively communicate. Yet communicating discomfort can be of great value. We present a method for developing wearables that transfer one person's discomfort to another: a modified fashion ideation process that enables a person to bring their hidden embodied experiences into wearable form. Using five complementary foci, the method seeks to simulate rather than replicate; to support people to find abstracted expressions for their lived experiences of discomfort, with which to negotiate shared understanding. The resulting wearables support empathic engagement with how another person might feel. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).