Statement of Purpose

Statement of Purpose

My research interests can be divided into two parts. One aspect is user friendly wearable system interfaces and the other is the topic of affective wearable media.

Traditionally, many of communication methods have been focused mainly on voice-based and text-based communication. These communication methods are not sufficient to fully express human emotions and contexts. Body gestures, the touch of a hand, and facial expression are aspects of ambient communication expressions which can sometimes better convey our intended minds and provide intrinsic information more accurately and with more human warmth.

Clothing has been used as a communication medium since ancient times, whereas garments and accessories express social positions, abilities, personalities, and occupations, etc. These expressions have especially focused on visual expressions through colours, shapes, and textures. But nowadays, we can embed variable smart materials, and sensors into clothing, accessories, and new synthetic or complex organic fabrics. As a result, we can express various colours, sounds, textures, and even smells and taste expressions through clothing. Thus, the wearer can express their emotions and feelings using these smart expressions on the clothing and soft fabric-based media.

This affective wearable media focuses on emotional communication that can deeply send our feelings and emotions to others. In other words, this communication method does not only convey raw information, but also our deep feelings, intentions, expressions, and culture. This will revolutionize the present digital communications and enhance social, business, and entertainment communication.

As a fashion design school student of Kookmin University, which is the most famous design school in Korea, I was passionate about making expressive garments and design drawings of various types. During my studies, I taught the composition design class at the design institute as a part-time job.

In Korea, all men are required to go through military and Public service or substitute service that is working for a company instead of military service. I passed qualification test and could do substitute service. Fortunately, during this time, I was able to work for a company involving both sides of the design and the engineering departments. The company was the Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) & Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solution Provider of IBM Korea. With my experience as a User Interface (UI) designer and web programmer, I perceived some gaps between the engineers and designers even though they used the same language throughout the many commercial projects. I realized that they were saying the same thing about the ‘user’ despite their different communication methods.

Naturally, this thought led me to decide to more deeply study the user and the interaction between design and engineering. I went to the Graduate School of Techno Design at Kookmin University to study Interaction Design which is an area studying human beings and interactions with other humans and artifacts with a focus on ubiquitous computing, mobile handsets, web, digital games, etc. The guiding principles were based on the human centered design concepts of prototype creation and user involvement in the design decision process. In the master course, I was involved in smart interaction projects such as, Motion Graphic User Interface in digital TV (MGUI) project with Samsung Electronics, smart home network service scenario project with ETRI, and smart home gadgets: a digital mirror and auditory user interfaces (AUI) with ICU. These projects all involved the user and in the ubiquitous computing environment, the body becomes the center of the action. It became clear to me that wearable interactive systems would be one of the important design frontiers faced in the future.

I focused my studies on wearable systems, wearable interfaces, and wearable interaction. This led to my master’s thesis entitled, “A study on the wearable computer interface design using the cloth fastening system.” This research involved the creation of prototypes and concept ideas of clothing fastener switches that can be separated, combined, and manipulated by users in a more friendly and easy manner. Through these smart clothing fasteners, I started to think about the clothing interaction with wearer and other people using smart lighting expressions on clothing. The wearable communication concept ideas-‘with you’ have been exhibited five times in Korea and Singapore and have been used in Korea Music Award Festival 2006. Additionally, I wrote six papers related to the issues uncovered in the process.

Fortunately, I have continued to study wearable media issues in the Mixed Reality Lab, IDM Institute in NUS through the huggy pajama project. This human to human interactive system focuses on the engineering and human interaction issues. This experience has led me to a better understanding of wider engineering issues while allowing me to further expand my research ideas relating to smart clothing and wearable systems.

My research interest in affective wearable media is truly interdisciplinary, requiring the integration of the following fields: Electrical and Computing Engineering, Fashion Design, Interaction Design, Sensibility Ergonomics, New Media Studies, and Psychology.

As I mentioned earlier, the engineering and design aspects seem to be very different, but in actuality, they are somewhat similar because they focus on the needs of users and in specific contexts, yet in one case focusing on engineering methods and in another, the focus is on design methods. There is a need to build bridges to more easily understand and harvest the benefits from these fields of research. I aim to be a strong bridge between these fields in the continued exploration into affective wearable media research.

Thank you very much for your kind attention to my long statement.