If These Pants Could Talk
At IDEO, I helped design the exhibit “If these pants could talk.”
Shopping is changing. Rather than relying on brand loyalty, today’s consumers — especially Gen Z — are more likely to make purchases based on how well a product’s origins align with their personal values. When our values become more important than a product’s brand, shopping increasingly resembles desk research. The research-heavy mode of shopping, however, requires time and skills that not everyone has. Even for the people willing and able to research the environmental impact of backstories of products, often the information they need isn’t available.
But what if you could learn everything you wanted to know about a product just by asking it directly?
What would you ask for a pair of jeans, if these pants could talk?
That was the idea behind this speculative concept. By walking through a store, and clipping a cable onto a pair of jeans, you can have a conversation with any of the products in the store through your phone interface. You could ask them anything — from materials to working conditions for sewing machine operators.
To make a working example of what it would be like to talk to a specific product, we built a simple app that lets you converse with a pair of vintage Levi 501 jeans through a standard chat interface. For San Francisco Design Week, we built an accompanying exhibit. We puffed out a pair of Levi’s jeans to give them a sense of volume and hung them on a rack next to a monitor and keyboard that people could use to chat with them. To imply the physical interface, we added a cable that “connected” the computer to the jeans to a display. During our event, we presented the concept to 150 guests and people lined up to ask the jeans questions.
Today, the talking pants are on a world tour — making pit stops at conferences and exhibits around the world!