Funder: Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant – EU Horizon 2020

Team: Jens Alexander Ewald, Jayne Wallace, Jon Rogers, Nick Taylor, Mel Woods (University of Dundee), Michelle Thorne (Mozilla Foundation)

Timeframe: 2019-2022

OpenDoTT is a PhD programme from Northumbria University and Mozilla to explore how to build a more open, secure, and trustworthy Internet of Things. The challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT) require interdisciplinary thinking. OpenDoTT trains five Early Stage Researchers with backgrounds in design, technology, arts and activism to create and advocate for connected products that are more open, secure, and trustworthy. The scope of Wearables and the Self asks whether IoT on and around the body can help us to become informed and knowing participants in the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things spreads in our homes, our neighbourhoods, our cities and landscapes; and to our bodies, to ourselves. We have attached computational smart technology to our  bodies for centuries: rings  with an integrated abacus in the 1600’s or watches in the 15nth century. Arguably the internet has brought a whole other dimension to the possibilities, necessities, and enhancements we add to ourselves; smart watches, fitness bands, smart medical devices, imploding in the multi functional black slates we carry with us as if they were a part of our body. Through them our activities transform into informational utterances voyaging into the vast networks, possibly re-appearing magically through other things or on someone next to us. Where else do they go on their journey? Are we a thing on the internet? Can the wearable IoT provide a potential for an alternative narrative that enables us to stay human in a network of things? I want to uncover the untold stories of the body, the self, and the things in between. Gathering our own stories and experiences with connected products in our day to day lives on our body we will transform stories of the now into alternative proposals of a potentially more poetic wearable Internet of Things, not products. Using resonance and poetry to tilt and move digital craft lenses that we can take a good look at what the wearable Internet of Things puts on and around us.