Open Innovation and Prospective Ergonomics for Smart Clothes

In this paper, we introduce our theoretical approach of Prospective Cognitive Ergonomics, our methodology and the results obtained through Homo Textilus, a project for designing what might be Smart Clothes, the future of interactions between people and their digital clothes. For collecting data, we used different kinds of inquiries (questionnaires, short interviews, brainstorming) resulting in more than 300 proposals about digital clothes involving many kinds of functions (ranging from textile properties to garments made of electronic parts such as sensors and actuators). We emphasize more precisely how counterfactual based reasoning may be a powerful tool to elicit responses about future objects by making people envisage alternative worlds by using, for instance, the “WHAT IF NOT” (WIN) method of creativity for innovation. Indeed, counterfactual reasoning plays an important role in predicting, planning and decision making and this kind of reasoning can be seen, at the same time, as a simulation mechanism (what could / would happen if…) and a computing mechanism (what I have to do to make it possible…). Finally, we demonstrate how the “WHAT IF NOT” method of creativity can be applied to objects, functions, procedures, and objects states to elicit new ideas about future things.