IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2016 - 110

Living in an environment pervasively
populated by networked clothes,
fabrics, textiles, and other materials
is fraught with the promise of a
new aesthetics of the body as a
fully networked object.
field is rapidly expanding into wearables, such as Fitbit and
other networked objects to be worn on one's body or interfaced
with in some other way [33].
It is worthwhile to briefly consider the logistics of connecting a random object or piece of clothing to the Internet.
To begin with, IoT connectivity implies that clothes acquire a
network address, thus becoming uniquely identifiable, and
broadcast sensory data either remotely to the cloud or in an
M2M mesh of devices. The sensory layer, if there is one
attached, allows clothes to dynamically register changes to
their environment and transmit that information over the network. Finally, an IoT-enabled piece of clothing has the ability
to process that information locally or in the cloud, and act
upon it independently from human input [34]. From a data
perspective, every garment equipped in this way becomes
context-aware, where context is understood as the triad of
location-identity-state [35]. As a result, such clothes have a
unique identity and are capable of dynamically engaging with
and registering changes to their location and state.
Now, consider already existing and overtly sociable objects
such as the Amazon Echo. Here, the IoT manifests itself
through physical objects acting as components of a system of
pervasive monitoring and control, augmenting materiality with
a layer of Internet connectivity. Arguably, from a human perspective, the tangible result is a seemingly animate materiality,
populated by objects often behaving as social heteroclites in
that they transgress the social boundaries set for them [29].
In addition, the contextual data aggregated by a networked
garment would most probably be transmitted to and indexed
in a remote database, from the perspective of which the contextual data themselves are the object. This is the case
because, from the point of view of that remote database, the
garment exists as an aggregate of location-identity-state
updates. Suddenly, the piece of clothing has morphed into an
information space. The logical endpoint of this dynamic is
that any IoT entity-be it a smart garment or a human
being-is a set of database relationships first and foremost,
and a material entity now and then [36], [37]. It only follows
that, if from a database perspective humans and smart fabrics
are primarily information spaces, their ontological status
shifts dramatically, to the extent that, as Rob van Kranenburg
quips "you will have more in common with your car than
with your neighbor" [38].
The emergence of smart garments, and therefore inevitably that of networked clothes, promises to even further prob110 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

OCTOBER 2016

lematize this state of affairs. When wearables first appeared
on the market in scale, they quickly led to unpredictable
sociocultural developments such as the quantified-self movement, the move to biosurveillance, and the fetishization of
body data as a new aesthetic form of self-expression [33].
Living in an environment pervasively populated by networked clothes, fabrics, textiles, and other materials is
fraught with the promise of a new aesthetics of the body as a
fully networked object. As wearables have demonstrated,
such an environment will be quickly normalized and woven
into the existing texture of our sociocultural practices, ranging from daily routines and fashion choices, to the extreme
and risky realities of the military, heavy industry, and emergency response teams.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Javad Foroughi (foroughi@uow.edu.au) earned his B.S. and
M.S. degrees in textile engineering in 1997 and his Ph.D.
degree in material engineering in 2009 from the University of
Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. He is currently
working as an Australian Research Council senior research
fellow at the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute, University of Wollongong. His research interests include nanomaterials, electromechanical actuators (artificial muscles) using
inherently conducting polymers and carbon nanotubes, bionics, and novel fiber spinning and the use of these in the development of smart materials and electronic textiles.
Teodor Mitew (tmitew@uow.edu.au) is a senior lecturer in
digital media and communications at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. His current work
focuses on analyzing phenomena related to the Internet of
Things from the perspective of object-oriented ontology and
actor network theory.
Philip Ogunbona (philip_ogunbona@uow.edu.au) is a
senior lecturer in digital media and communications at the
University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. His
current work focuses on analyzing phenomena related to the
Internet of Things from the perspective of object-oriented
ontology and actor network theory.
Raad Raad (raad@uow.edu.au) earned his B.E. degree
(with honors) in 1997 and his Ph.D. degree (sponsored by
Motorola Research Labs and Telstra) in 2006. He is a senior
lecturer at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales,
Australia. His research on differentiated quality-of-service
management in wireless networks and radio-frequency identification (RFID) are widely cited in the literature. His expertise is in wireless communications with a focus on medium
access control and bandwidth management protocols for
wireless networks. He has led and collaborated on significant
projects in the areas of sensor networks, IEEE 802.11, IEEE
802.15.3, mesh local area networks, RFIDs, and cellular networks. His most recent activities and publications are in peerto-peer delivery of scalable videos and CubeSat. He is a
Member of the IEEE.
Farzad Safaei (farzad@uow.edu.au) is the chair of telecommunications engineering at the University of Wollongong,

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