The Wearable Futures Hackathon was a 12-week long, (online/offline) interdisciplinary course developed for students of the XXXX program at XXXX. The program focuses on wearable technology and culminates in an exhibition of the participant’s artwork. To the best of our knowledge, the hackathon is a pioneering artistic practice and exploration on speculative design and futures thinking through wearable technology, certainly within a national and regional context. In this pictorial essay, we elaborate on each of the weeks’ activities and the results of the program. In this institutional presentation, we intend to elaborate on each of the weeks’ activities and the final results of the program

During the pandemic, we were compelled to migrate our lives to the digital space. Despite technological advancements, it became evident that virtual experiences cannot fully replace real-life, in-person interactions, exposing the limitations of digital representations. Nonrepresentational and affective aspects are often undervalued, disregarded, as most human experiences are digitized. This paper contends that these ephemeral and intangible phenomena deserve further attention, particularly for cultivating a sustainable relationship with technology. Recognizing these challenges due to their nonlinguistic and invisible natures, the author proposes artmaking as an alternative research method to overcome such obstacles. Drawing on personal experiences as an artist, the author demonstrates affective experiences and cognitive interactions with technology—beyond consciousness and digital representations. The paper highlights that media artists are in an advantageous position to investigate such intangible and nonrepresentational aspects in technology. They can examine their first-hand experiences in the artmaking process and demonstrate them through artworks in nonlinguistic ways. The author also posits that such bodily experiences with digital media lead to an affective and sustainable assemblage of human-technology cognition.

To protect information—both individuals’ and corporations’—we use locks in both the real world and the digital environment. Due to the non-physicality in the digital environment, digital locks have appeared, such as numeric and letter-based combinations, the most common and secure way to perform any online activity. For additional security purposes, passwords have to be updated every few months. Clearly, it is true that there is no way to avoid using those passwords as long as we connect to the digital world. In other words, users easily get overwhelmed by the plethora of passwords regarding secure combinations, security questions, and regulations. Biometric data is permanent and cannot be changed— you cannot change your biologically innate iris or fingerprint. To lessen the burden, digital authentication systems apply biometrics technologies, such as iris scanners or fingerprint sensors on smartphones. Inspired by ancient signet rings (seals), the author proposes a speculative art object, Lock at First Sight (2020), a soft contact lens with a unique marker as a wearable security lock, which highlights lesser-known vulnerabilities in biometrics. This object is intended as social and artistic commentary, not as a functional product proposal for a commercial marketplace.

This paper examines the resurgence of interdisciplinary research that bridges art and science. It underscores the ways computational advancements and the pressing demands posed by climate change are driving the revival. It traces the movement's occidental origins from 'natural philosophy' in pre-Renaissance Europe, through the Modernist era of strict disciplinary divisions, to the present-day dissolution of boundaries.
Advancing frameworks of co-creation, this paper culminates in a reinforcement of the importance of pluralistic perspectives in research through the participation of diverse publics. It concludes by stressing the importance of fostering environments where a range of perspectives and research methodologies can mingle and thrive, acknowledging the potential of these efforts in addressing the complex global challenges presented by climate change.