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)
gingercoons
genkidesu
