Later City News: Wearable electronics endow us with a great capacity to see clothing as an extension of our body and an interface to interact with our physical and social environment. The fashion industry is experimenting with new tectonics and materiality, however, few projects have explored wearables in the public and social domains and how they can dynamically respond to a wide range of interpersonal distances in social interaction.
PNEU-SKIN is a pneumatic wearable that uses critical making as a research strategy to explore interactive and soft interfaces to create soft boundaries between private and public space.
A paper published by Yujie Wang from "Massachusetts Institute of Technology" and Marcela Godoy from "New York University Shanghai" proposes an embodied computation agenda and describes the design and prototyping process of a multi-sensory smart skin in response to varying social distance in interpersonal communication.
By looking at adaptive behaviors in nature and the way that certain animal species respond to external stimuli by increasing their size and providing multi-sensory responses, PNEU-SKIN looks into how our clothing could become an adaptable skin to redefine interpersonal communication experience within everyday social interaction.
This paper has been published by the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong (2021). The authors believe technology is allowing us to see our clothing as an extension of our body and an interface to interact with our environment.
Nowadays, wearable electronics are becoming everyday objects and designers found an opportunity in combining traditional techniques with technology to explore more complex ways of communication. As Sterlac observes, with the use of technology “the body has become an extended operational system, performing beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space that it inhabits.”
Artists, designers, and architects are now crossing disciplines to explore the realm of fashion, utilizing digital fabrication and electronics they are proposing new wearables from the point of view of performance, new tectonics, and materiality. Architect Behnaz Farahi exposes social issues such as gender and intimacy through the creation of robotic wearable technology. For example, her project Caress of the Gaze is a 3D printed actuated cape, which retracts and expands, changing its shapes according to external stimulus sessed by a camera embedded to the wearable.
As the fashion industry is experimenting with new tectonics and materiality, however, few projects have explored wearables in the public and social domains and how it can dynamically respond to a wide range of interpersonal distances in social interaction. In this paper, we describe the design and prototyping processes of PNEU-SKIN, a pneumatic wearable that uses critical making as a research strategy to explore interactive and soft interfaces to create soft boundaries between private and public space.
End/
Comments