The design of social wearables—wearable technology that augments collocated social interaction—aims to integrate new technical functions into dress to make them socially acceptable and fashionable. However, fashion and technology follow adoption cycles, and social norms change over time and differ depending on their social context. Therefore more research is needed to understand better how to design for specific cultural contexts.

We conducted a ten-month ethnography on the practice of customising and wearing boilersuits—opiskelijahaalarit—in the Finnish university engineering student culture and co-designed concepts for social wearables using the dialogue-labs method.