Tech designers and journalists often talk as if technologies are used the same way across the world, but the reality is that different countries, cities and even neighborhoods have their own way of doing things.
For example, a recent study found that two-thirds of Americans thought it was ok to talk on their smartphones while using public transport, but only 4 per cent of Japanese people agreed. And, differences are now emerging between national cultures in terms of attitudes towards wearable technology, with European consumers often more reserved and cautious towards wearables than their American counterparts.
While almost half of Americans expressed interest in owning wearables in a Harris poll, another survey showed that only a quarter of British people thought wearables would be worth owning.
Brits also seem to be more concerned about the appearance of wearables than those in the US, with over 30% of people in the UK stating that using wearable tech would make them feel embarrassed or self-conscious. Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Fashion Innovation Technology at the London College of Fashion, suggested in a recent interview with Wareable that these different attitudes towards wearables are partly down to different fashion cultures.
“What you see in London is a vibrancy and an energy which is very different to New York or Paris where there is a much more conservative attitude towards the way that you dress… A lot of the wearable products at the moment are very corporate looking.”
Each fashion capital has a unique take on style and as new, up-and-coming fashion hubs emerge in global destinations from Sydney to São Paulo, the likelihood is that global fashion will become ever more diverse. In turn, that means that wearables will need to be highly personalisable and adaptable to different contexts and tastes; as Apple has recognised with the wide range of colours, cases and straps for its market-defining Watch.
Wearables such as the Tago Arc bracelet borrow from the smart dress playbook by allowing users to change the appearance of their body-mounted devices at the swipe of an iPhone screen and it’s likely that more and more wearables will feature some kind of modifiable appearance in order to fit more easily into different stylistic cultures.
As technology develops, some industry players – like Wearables Technology CEO Christian Stammel – think that wearables will diverge into fashionable accessories like the Tago Arc, on the one hand, and functional but invisible technologies used for social media alerts and health and wellness purposes like the Proteus Digital Health ingestible sensor, on the other. In the meantime, though, the industry needs to focus on maximising personalisation in order to ensure that wearables fit as smoothly as possible into different fashion and technology cultures. If designers pay enough attention to getting the fashion right, maybe even the cautious Brits can be won over to wearing wearables.
