Jewelry weaves into our everyday lives as no other wearable does. It comes in many wearable forms, is fashionable, and can adorn any part of the body. In this paper, through an exploratory, research-through-design process, we tap into this vast potential space of input interaction that jewelry can enable. We do so by first identifying a small set of fundamental structural elements — called Jewelements — that any jewelry is composed of, and then defining their properties that enable the interaction. We leverage this synthesis along with observational data and literature to formulate a design space of jewelry-enabled input techniques. This framework encapsulates both the extensions of common existing input methods (e.g., touch) as well as a few new ones inspired by jewelry. Furthermore, we discuss our prototypical sensor-based implementations. Through this work, we invite the community to engage in the conversation on how jewelry as a “material” can help shape wearable-based input.

These are some of the day-to-day interactions that Jewelry enables

Jatin Arora, Kartik Mathur, Aryan Saini, and Aman Parnami. 2019. Gehna: Exploring the Design Space of Jewelry as an Input Modality. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 521, 1–12. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300751