I was super honored to welcome David Jay and Maddy Maxie to SFPC today for a conversation about wearable technology.

Maddy Maxey is CTO at The Crated, a product development studio and consultancy focused on wearable tech, enhanced apparel and computational design.

David is co-leading a smartwatch team at the Samsung Accelerator, exploring ways to push the bounds of wearable interfaces.

They’re also both wonderful people, who take a thoughtful and nuanced approach to everything they do. I enjoy conversations with them and the questions they ask. So, it was so nice to have them come visit the school and be able to welcome them to our community.

The event went well. They started with short introductions, a bit about why they are intersted in this space, and then we broke into two smaller groups to talk about what we might want to create in the wearables space. The smaller group conversation seemed to make it easier to bring out everyone’s voice, in a way that is harder when we’re having one big conversation. Afterwards we came back together as a large group. The goal was to talk about how we could get our own hands dirty and what next steps might be. But I think that most of us were still struggling to think about what potential wearables offer and what problems they could solve/needs they could meet, and weren’t quite ready to think about what our next steps might be. So, that will remain for another day. Instead someone asked what made them excited about wearables and I asked what they worried about. I really enjoyed seeing their curiosity and sense of possibility balanced with concerns about the challenges, and they’re interest in addressing those challenges in their own work.

Thanks to Maddy & David for joining us!