Contacting people was hard. Some of them didn't even reply to me or finding their contacts was quite difficult. Initially, I went to the wearable technology show website and wrote it down the name of the speakers that matter the most to my project. After that, I went to Google and searched their names to find an email address, a Twitter account or something that I could reach them. Most of them use Linkedln and their informations are not always available. I managed to find some of them on Twitter. That's where it all started, now I'm following all of them and some of them are following me back.
So after a couple of attempts, I managed to contact a professor from the Nottingham Trent University, Tilak Dias, the director of the company Made with Gloves, Michelle Hue (who invited me to the Fashion-tech Meetup) John Weir, director of the Wearable Technology Show, Priti Veja who is a researcher and designer at Weft Labs and Claire Duke-Woolley from the Beecham Research. These people were amazingly helpful to me and they kindly give hours of the days answering my questions.
I tweeted, emailed and some I called for an interview. It was really rich and informative for my project, I learned a lot and could understand what is missing in this field. Some of them really encouraged me to go further and create a real thing. I'm still waiting for a couple more answers because some of them I sent after the event on Thursday.
The questions I sent them were:
1) How is the engagement between your work and the fashion industry?
2) I read once on Wired that one of the reasons people won’t buy wearable gadgets is because they are ugly(as in not fashionable), specially clothes. Do you think the Apple Watch and things like CUTECIRCUIT are good steps in creating wearables that are pretty? or do you think people still won’t use it? What are your thoughts about it?
3) Yesterday we talk a lot about the difficulties between fashion designers and this type of technology, do you think by having new degrees and more units about it at universities could help to make this gap between them smaller?
4) What do you think the fashion industry can do to help develop and expand the studies and practice on wearable technology?
5) People tend to use clothes as a way of expressing themselves more than the utility. How do you think wearables can be applied in that scenario?
6) What do you is missing in the media when it comes to wearables? Do you think that having people from the fashion industry talking about it could help?The goal of my project is to create a website about wearables.
7) Do you think ego can also be one of the factors that these two different and big industries don't collaborate as much as they should?
8) If I turned this project into a real website, what advice could you give it to me?
And from that the discussion started, the questions changed and we talked more and more.