Some added thoughts on Wearable Computing

So last week we started talking about notions of control, conformity, and the rigidity of standardized design in clothing, and we’ve since come up with a few new ideas/evolutions to our design.

We had discussed the idea of a dress that expanded or contracted based on the surrounding noise levels, to in a sense force the wearer’s appearance to conform to the situation in which they find themselves – outside of the wearer’s control.

We liked the idea about control, but wanted to experiment with the ideas of standardization and more literally leaving the construction/design of a garment’s shape in the hands of another person.  From this we evolved the design of the dress to allow for a more one-to-wearer control of the garment.

The idea is to connect a series of wires to the hem of the dress and to gears & motors around the waist area of the dress (some design thoughts on this need to be worked out still) – additional wires and motors will be connected to the cuffs and shoulders of the dress respectively.  The motors will be controlled by a series of knobs sewn down the spine of the dress.

The idea behind this is that the dress can be adjusted in a variety of ways, and thus is highly customizable; however, because of the location of the knobs it is only adjustable by someone other than the wearer of the garment.  Furthermore, this design resembles the classical design of a corset, a device that was used for conformity of look and style, and also required the assistance of an outsider for its functioning.

Going to the Wearable Computing meeting last night also brought up some interesting insight and potential challenges that we may face in implementing the design.

1. How will we get enough power to the motors to lift the dress?  We can create a battery pack and fit it somewhere on the dress, but batteries = weight which could be an issue.

2. What approach will we use for the motors/gears to lift the wires (the ones we’ve used in class are fairly bulky and may make it hard to fit in the dress without really compromising the look/wearability or it.

2.1 One of the other members discussed a type of wire that contracts when it receives and electrical charge… this might be an option but he warned that it doesn’t contract a lot so it may limit the effectiveness of this approach, but it is worth looking into

3. The idea of design in regards to how the dress looks when its pulled up by the wires.  One member suggested weaving the wire into the fabric so it would bunch when retracted (more a style idea, but worth thinking about)

Brainstorming about wearable computing

Last week, I fell in love with wearable computing and the LilyPad Arduino. So now, I have my heart set on doing something wearable. I’ve been racking my brain for the last few days, trying to think about what wearable computing means, can speak about and can do. What it can help to understand and explore. There are, of course, the standard body issues. People always use wearables to talk about body, movement and gesture. But there are others, too. There’s the discussion of garments themselves, of identity, performance, textile as thing, textile as process, textile as politics, skin, armour, control and consumption.

So I’ve been thinking about control. How do we control ourselves? How do others control us? How do our objects control us? How do we control our objects? I realized that there’s a very common way in which both our objects and the decisions of other control us. And, unsurprisingly (because this is me doing the thinking), it has to do with standardization. Our garments (pants, shirts, dresses, shoes, even hats) are of standardized sizes. We fit our non-standard bodies into whichever garment has the least-bad fit (not the best fit, the least-bad). We do our damnedest to fit these shapes, aiming for arbitrary dimensions. But we can and do fight back against our garments. We hack our garments to fit and work better or look different. Look at how cyclists roll one pant leg, how girls in private schools roll their kilts, how people hem their pants (all acts of shortening, incidentally) or wear them at different places on the waist or hips.

Basically, it’s about control, standardization and arbitrary decisions taken for us by others. If it is, indeed, about those things, how can we talk critically about them? How do we use physicality to talk critically about those control mechanisms? I’ve got some ideas. It could be embodied by an ever-contracting or ever-expanding garment. Or, indeed, by a garment which constantly oscillates in either direction. It could be done through the use of struts, referencing those control mechanisms of old, the bones in corsetry. It could be a garment which responds to struggle and motion. It could be one which makes explicit the assumptions implicit in fit and garment standardization. Or (and this, I think, is the big one) it could be a garment which allows someone other than the wearer to make decisions about its fit and functionality.

How would we do that? It could have an input mechanism which allows users (but not wearers) to choose the measurements of the garment. It could involve pull strings and buttons. It could be context sensitive in some way, responding to the things around it, such as noise, light and touch. Sound seems an attractive option, if only because it can be easily manipulated.

Consider, then, a garment which becomes progressively tighter and less comfortable, more form fitting, shorter and so on as noise levels increase. It starts as a sort of robe or sack, when in silence.

But then I wondered: does that talk about something different? Is it really about everything mentioned above? I wondered: what exactly do I mean when I put forward a garment which changes based on ambient conditions? Is there ever a “good” condition? What is the ground state of this garment? How does it look and feel when in the presence of silence? Are we in fact discussing the conception of body in connection with the presence of sound (eg: garments tend to be tighter and smaller in the presence of loud dance music, looser and larger in a silent graveyard or monastery)? That’s a very different discussion than the one about the battle between body and garment standardization.

Discuss.

So, there’s this garment. When it is in a silent space, it billows and has no form. It masks the shape of its wearer, covering her (because it’s always a her) almost completely. As the noise level rises, the garment begins to shrink, the fabric ruching and scrunching together, accompanied by the sound of whirring motors. As the music becomes louder, the motors whirr faster. As it gets quieter, they slow down, eventually letting the fabric fall back. At its extreme, fabric is bunched up tightly around the wearer, making her uncomfortable and inconvenienced.

What, then, does that description say? It says that there is no right fit, only a series of wrong fits, or that the idea of right fit is subjective, based on the body individual. It says that outside factors have an impact on intimate things. It says that someone else has control over the way your clothes fit, over the way you represent your body. But it also says that if you know how to game the system and are capable of jumping through a few hoops, you can wear the garment in your desired way (in this case, by keeping sound at a level which causes a pleasing effect in the garment).

How would it be done? It would involve a great big tent of a garment, some motors, some cable, an arduino to control the movement of the whole works, possibly some sort of frame to support the motors because they’re probably not very light.

And incidentally, it doesn’t have to be a dress. It’s always a damn dress. This could be a romper or something.

Also, because good little artists have a bad habit of coming up with names first, I’d call it Non-Standard Bodies because I like the way that sounds.