Identity through Social Wearables: Designing with Finnish University Students

Wearable devices are often expressive and part of our social interactions. Fashion and ethnographic studies have argued for a perspective on socio-cultural practices in wearable design, while recent work in HCI only began to formalise social requirements for wearable design. Our work aimed to understand how cultural practices can inform wearable design. We conducted a ten-month field study on the practice of customising and wearing boiler suits (fi: opiskeljhaalarit) in the Finnish university student culture and co-designed concepts for social wearables using the dialogue-labs method. The most popular designs supported self-expression and belonging to a group, which comply with the students’ cultural practices of constructing social identity. We conclude that social wearables need to let users negotiate between differentiation and belonging to become part of everyday cultural practices.