Snowflakes : A prototyping tool for computational jewelry

Abstract

Smart-jewelry design has many layers such as comfort, ergonomics, fashionability, interactivity and functionality that create a complex design process, making the form exploration challenging. Various wearable prototyping tools were developed to overcome this chal-lenge; however, they are usually textile-based and do not target smart jewelry design. To bridge this gap, we developed Snowfakes that diferentiates from existing tools by 1) allowing designers to ex-plore diferent jewelry forms, 2) incorporating external materials such as leather, 3) creating form factors that ft body parts with fexible con-nectors. In this paper, we explain the design process of Snowfakeswhich is inspired by 7 design parameters (limbs, materials, grip, fastener, decoration, placement, form) extracted through the ex-amination of non-smart jewelry. We also demonstrate three reim-plementations and design concepts implemented with Snowfakes.Our exploration with Snowfakes contributes to the wearable community in terms of smart-jewelry visual expressions, interaction modalities, and merger of traditional and computational materials.