15:30 - 17:30, Friday 29th April 2016
River Room - Level 2, King's College London

This session is part of the Creativeworks London Festival. A full list of CWL Festival sessions can be found here.

The Culture Capital Exchange (TCCE), in collaboration with the Creativeworks London Festival (#CWLfest), invites you to a roundtable discussion exploring critical thinking around Wearables and their developments in the near future.

Following on from the CWL Critical Wearables Research Lab in June 2015, we invite you to join the team again to learn about some of the outcomes of that workshop and to further expand on the issues that aren’t considered in the usual wearables narrative, and discuss this burgeoning part of the creative economy that strangely lacks critical research attention.

Potential discussion topics include:

• Wearables have an emerging and dynamic role in the creative economy so, why is there a lack of critical research?

• We have seen them in computing, design, fashion and activism, let’s share perspectives.

• Can we raise vital questions about the politics embedded in the technologies, before rushing to build the next prototype?

• What are the less visible parts of the wearable apparatus (e.g. the so-called cloud) and what are their social implications?

• How have you been involved with wearables, could they provide you with an unexpected angle to approach research or your profession?

This Ideas Lab will be led by Dr Dan McQuillan, CWL’s London’s Digital Economy strand researcher & Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, with Rachel Lasebikan and Dr Enrico Bertelli. Provocations delivered by Carl Smith (Director of the Learning Technology Research Centre at Ravensbourne), Becky Stewart (Anti Alias Labs) and Prof Sandy Black (London College of Fashion, UAL) at the Creativeworks London Festival; a finale event to showcase and celebrate the outcomes of four years of collaborative Knowledge Exchange. Creativeworks London set out to fuse the capital’s creative economy with some of the finest academic institutions in the world. This event aims to create a stimulating environment where conversations can lead to competitive advantage and outstanding innovation.

The gathering will be of interest to makers, researchers and entrepreneurs who are active or interested in the concept of wearables and the broader changes they will bring in the makers movement. We welcome resilient contributions from those working at the intersection of culture and technology and entrepreneurs with an interest in the community.

TCCE’s Ideas Labs: quarterly gatherings open to academics and creative entrepreneurs, of around 30 persons in size. They offer brainstorming, networking and collaborative cross-disciplinary opportunities. They allow guests to define the scope of an issue, agree upon a common language, and use creative and innovative thinking techniques to focus on a problem.