The intermediate wearables


”What’s gonna be the next thing?

Thinking pause. Hmm. Something, something disruptive. Yeah.

“Wearables?”

Working within and around the design, communication, service and tech industry, it’s hard today to avoid the words disruptive, digital and the future. (Digital is by far one of the most unavoidable words wherever, but the three-word-combo is more industry-specific.) People like Mark Comerford (@markmedia) say that the digital revolution is of the same magnitude as the industrial revolution. Through Kurzweil we since long know about technological singularity. In the news we hear about how artificial intelligence (AI) will outcompete us for a majority of our jobs. I can go on and on, establishing ethos, but the important thing remains. It’s all true.

“It’s all true.”


What the old big thing was is, well, old, but unarguably the word of mouth is that wearables is the next big thing. Although mostly recognized for their potential in lifestyle and health services; the fashion industry, the banking industry and others are quickly picking up. But is it really the next big thing? Or is it the big thing leading us somewhere even greater?

When will we get tired of fiddling with gear outside and around us?

When the mobile phone headsets first appeared, we observed seemingly crazy people talk in midair with agitated gestures. We already had mouse-arms and pain-in-the-neck desktop experiences, and today we have added smartphone-thumbs, texting-car-accidents and what-have-you-nots. Now we’re adding the layer of watches and more high-tech wearables, soon making us potentially look like we’re having a bad itch. (Have you seen people with Google glasses? Not necessarily a pretty sight.)

At the same time we have chipping and implants and exoskeletons happening. We have smart AI-technology that are even surprisingly smart. Isn’t there a 1+1=1267 here?

“Isn’t there a 1+1=1267 here?”


For those of you (100% I suspect) whom has forgotten the running title, “The Intermediate Wearables”, this was a friendly reminder of what will be my point. Predicting the future is generally something I discourage people to do, or as I tweeted a while back. “Predicting the future is a lot less interesting than shaping it. Or even adapting to it.” But going against my own advice just for the sense of exploring a thought, I discovered was interesting.

What if wearables is just an intermediate, just a bridge for our full smart-tech integration? The 1267 sum of the digitalness, the AI’s, the wearables, the chips — isn’t that just us being a new us? A smarter us, a more integrated us. But nevertheless. A new us.


  1. What could be absolutely and wildly crazy about this is that we might be at the dawn of the evolution of a new species.
  2. The mitochondrion that sits in every cell of our body, is thought to originate from the bacteria. So we have done it before.