Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman and designer Yves Behar spoke today at the Innovation by Design conference here in New York, and had a couple of interesting things to say about fashion, design, and user interface.
A post on FastCompanyDesign (whose conference it is) quote Rahman as saying that fashion and technology design conflict because people use fashion to set themselves apart, but technology is more or less a standardized thing. I think this is true to some extent, but not perhaps entirely. iPhone cases are clearly a way people personalize a highly mass-produced product, but they then slip the phones into mass-market clothing. There are ways to personalize technology by accessorizing, not inherent design.
Behar is on firmer ground, I think, when he says that the data generated by wearables can be used as a tool of personalization, not just as a monitor. The user interface may be invisible. But the outward display of the data from wearable fashion may be profound.