Digital, mechanical and eletronic fashion show

Amanda Parkes just gave me the booklet she designed for Unravel, a technology-driven fashion event at Siggraph 2007 this year. A premiere. I am so lucky to share an office with the curator and fashion chair of this event!

"Unravel" brings together the works of international designers and artists to present innovative and interactive works in computational and conceptual couture, socially conscious fashion, science-inspired from, and new technologies in textiles.

If you attend the event in San Diego, California, you will see:

· Solar Bikini by Andrew Schneider. A solar film bikini that charges your iPod! (With a USB connection!) The suit is a standard medium-sized bikini swimsuit retrofitted with 1" x 4" photovoltaic film strips sewn together in series with conductive thread. The cells terminate in a 5 volt regulator into a female USB connection


Solar Bikini

· Walking City and Index of Indifference by Yin Gao, projects that I particularly love! Dresses respond to their physical and acoustical environment, the ethereal garments just breath ...


Walking City

· Intimate Controllers by Jenny Chowdhury. A platform where video games are played by couples touching each others.

· Smoking Jacket by Fiona Carswell. The jacket has a built-in pair of lungs on the front. As the wearer smokes, the lungs fill up with the exhaled cigarette smoke and begin to gradually darken over time.


Smoking Jacket

· Hacking Couture, a web portal that allows the launching of new fashion aesthetics by the continuous contribution of users of the site, giving an exploratory spin to the traditional design process in fashion, allowing a collective collaboration in means of self-expression and the enhancement of creativity by the application of the concepts of Open Source.

· Self-Sustainable chair by Joo Youn Paek, a conceptual garment that motivates users to consistently switch between walking and sitting as a loop behavior on the street. The balance between exercise and rest would be maintained by wearing this suit.


Self-Sustainable chair

· Muttering Hat & Talk to Yourself Hat by Kate Hartman.
Muttering Hat A pair of muttering balls are tethered to the hat. They may be stuck to your ears, so that all other noise is obstructed by the mutterings, or they may be detached, providing the opportunity to escape from the mutterings or to share them with a friend.
Talk to Yourself Hat Through the use of a communication system embedded in the hat, you may speak outloud to yourself while retaining the right to a somewhat private conversation.


Muttering Hat

· Knitter's Tapestry by Daniela K. Rosner and Kimiko Ryokai.

An experimental dress knit with recordable magnetic tape that travels with the knitter and captures the knitter's experience as she knits.


Knitter's Tapestry


Knitter's Tapestry - detail

· Solar vintage, we will become silhouettes by Elena Corchero, a collection of accessories for the eco-fashion-minded in which technology meets tradition.


Solar Vintage

· Jacket Antics by Barbara Layne and Studio subTela, that feature unique texts and designs scrolling through the LED array on each of the backs.

· Kameraflage(TM) by Connor Dickie, a display technology that is invisible to the naked eye, yet is visible when imaged with a digital camera.


On this picture, the thunder-cloud has a lightening-bolt appear in the photograph

· Negociation by Daniela Kostova, Galina Kumanova, Olivia Robinson, a wearable interactive video system that combines textiles and technology to explore concepts of identity creation, presence and absence, integration and estrangement in different political and cultural environment. The wearers of the suit merge with the visual environment they inhabit.


Negociation


Negication' still during a performance: The persons seem to disappear.

· Cherry Blossoms: When War Comes Home by Alyssa Wright addresses the disparity between human suffering and perception of that suffering.

A mapping technology that transports one into the world of another, Cherry Blossoms gives witness to the tragedy of war. A backpack is outfitted with a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative locations are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. A technology for empathy, Cherry Blossoms honors the human cost of war.


Cherry Blossoms, a cloud of confetti, each confetti showing the name of a civilian who died in the Iraq war and the circumstances of his/her death.

· Shutters by Marcelo Coelho and Steve Helsing, is a soft kinetic membrane for environmental control and communication.

It is composed of actuated louvers (or shutters) that can be individually addressed for precise control of ventilation, daylight incidence and information display. By combining smart materials, textiles and computation, Shutters builds upon other façade systems to create living environments and work spaces that are more energy efficient, while being aesthetically pleasing and considerate of its inhabitants’ activities.

· Bracelets and Reconfigure, two projects by Leah Buechley.

Each bracelet, woven on a traditinoal bead loom out of beads, conductive thread and surface mount LEDs, is a 5x10 display matrix that can be programmed with animations like cellular automata and scrolling text. I strove to make the bracelets lovely with the electricity on as well as off; the most recent versions are almost as thin and flexible as traditional beaded jewelry, controlled with surface mount electronics and soft circuitry and powered with flexible Lithium-ion batteries.

Reconfigure is a platform for interactive performance. A reconfigurable costume consists of a torso piece and an assortment of sensing appendages that can be snapped to the torso. Sensors in the appendages include muscle flex sensors, accelerometers, bend sensors and touch sensors. Sensor data is relayed to a computer, via a bluetooth module embedded in the torso, where it can be used to control or generate music, video and other multimedia content.

· Peau d'Âne by Valérie Lamontagne. Peau d'Âne, a fairy tale from Charles Perrault, is reinterpreted by giving life to the 'impossible' dresses that a young princess orders her stepfather to thwart marrying him.


Peau d'Âne

Technical diagram of Peau d'Âne.

An Investigation into Perspective Taking Skills

"Children believe that animals understand them and that they can share some of their problems with animals. Animals unconditionally love children without judging them so children can easily share their daily problems with animals"

An Investigation into the Perspective Taking Skills of 6-Year-Old Children in Terms of Pet Feeding and Gender Variables by Aysel Koksal Akyol and Vuslat O uz. In Humanity & Social Sciences Journal 2 (1): 08-13, 2007

Paper available online.

Abstract This research has been designed in order to investigate the perspective taking skills of 6-year-old children in terms of the variables ‘pet feeding at home’ and ‘gender’. 100 six-year-old children attending nursery schools participated in the research. Data were collected through a “Personal Information Form” and the “Perspective Taking Test”. In analyzing the data, t-test was applied. As a result of the analysis, it has been determined that the status of pet feeding has an impact on the perceptional perspective taking skills of children (p<0.05) and the gender of the child has an impact on the cognitive perspective taking skills (p<0.01). Consequently, some recommendations have been made.

Overview
This paper presents the potential of a pet, as a companion for a child, transitioning from stuffed animals to communicating with others and supporting the child's emotional development. Communication with pets can be mainly non-verbal so that children with communication difficulty progress with pets. Also a study demonstrated the important correlation between the level of the relationship of children with their pets and their level of empathy.

The authors present a comprehensive definition for perspective taking
Perspective taking skills are formed from perceptional (to be aware of what another person sees), cognitive (to be aware of what another person thinks) and emotional (to be aware of how another feels) elements(...) Perspective taking is also defined as the emotional reactions shared in the experience of the child against the emotional reactions of the other person. Perspective taking includes both cognitive understanding of another person’s experience (playing a role) and the emotional understanding of another person’s emotional situation (experiencing). A person with the perspective taking ability can feel the other’s emotions after defining his emotion and perspective partially

Study
The study in this research involved 100 and 6-year-old children. Children take the “Perspective Taking Test (Perceptional Perspective Taking Test, Cognitive Perspective Taking Test, Emotional Perspective Taking Test)” and parents take the Personal Information Form and the Empathetic Skills Scale. In the results, the empathy points of pet feeding children are higher. In children’s interaction with animals, their being able to put themselves in the animal’s place is important for them to understand whether the animal is hungry or not, whether they are hurt or not, or else whether they want to be taken care of or not. The perceptional perspective skills of pet feeding children may have resulted high for this reason.

They conclude that the communication skills of pet feeding children improve and their perspective taking skills are affected positively. They propose that parents support the love and interest of their child to their pet. Children’s love for animals can be developed through visual mass communication tools and the media, by allocating more space for animal related publications and broadcasting.
Based on this result, I wander if children playing with Tamagotchi perform better at empathy, unless the attribution of feelings to a character that is virtual kind of mix the cards ...

I am particularly interested in the subject of perspective taking. Studying perspective taking in discourse structure as well as social perspective, I designed from 2000-2002 a computational toy to enhance narrative perspective-taking. The most fascinated finding in the part of this research on social perspective taking, is that children benefited from the technological toy in reflecting on their hypothesis about their environment, about people, about their personal experiences. I discovered there was a huge potential in computing toys for comforting children in their natural discoveries. Technology cannot replace human or pets interrelationship, but it has the advantage to be neither of these and just offer children fun, authorship and feedback on their creation. In this process a mechanism can be designed to reinforce a particular cognitive skill.

I later designed video systems for children to share creations with one another using video game controllers in a public museum space. Computational tools for adults and children to perform videos in real time using their video database, as well as sms'ing in the public space using a community video database, and a tangible system for remote communities to create, edit, perform and share video creations.
The power of video is immense, it is the witness of an event. I am now researching on the relationship with perspective taking between personal video and personal voice using tangible materials.


Picture extracted from my thesis Dolltalk: A computational toy to enhance narrative perspective-taking. Thesis available online

Dolltalk (2000)
I created DollTalk to help young children take different perspectives during storytelling play. The child tells his/her story to an animated computer character, using two stuffed animals as props while their story is recorded. The stuffed animals contain accelerometers that monitor the movement of those toys; statistical analysis of children's play with props allows the system to assume that if a toy is being shaken, then the child is narrating a story segment associated with that toy. The system also computes different types of motions, from a single toy being shaken, to multiple ones and their frequencies over time. In parallel, the system analyzes the speech of the child. The combination of sound and gestural parameters analysis allows Dolltalk to determine the structure of the narration: from a dialog to a narrator voice, this to offer adequate interaction. In Dolltalk "easy mode", when the child is done telling a story, the recorded audio is played back with two different pitches to signify the stuffed animal that was speaking at the time. In a more "advanced mode", the story is played back using a narrator voice and offers different understandings for the same story using the storyline of the child.

Elisabeth Sylvan: the Sharing of Wonderful Ideas

Dr Elisabeth Sylvan

Today I attended the thesis defense of my friend Elisabeth Sylvan, now Dr Elisabeth Sylvan, from the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Laboratory. Her dissertation is entitled the Sharing of Wonderful Ideas: Influence and Interaction in Online Communities of Creators.

At her dissertation committee: Mitchel Resnick, Alex P. Pentland and Peter Gloor

Abstract
This thesis presents a new framework for understanding how communities of creators share work, influence one another's creative processes, and learn from one another. I introduce the concept of Online Communities of Creators (OCOCs), which are online communities where the core activity is sharing personal creations. Using a mixed-methods approach of ethnography and social network analysis, I study two specific OCOCs: the Computer Clubhouse Village and the Scratch online community.

I analyze how ideas spread through OCOCs using the framework for diffusion of innovation developed by Everett Rogers. I map specific behaviors in OCOCs to Roger's five stages of adoption of innovation: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial and adoption. Within OCOCs each of these stages represent deepening understanding of other community members' work. The last two stages can be seen as members learning from each other. I report on how different social and project-related activities support the communities. I analyze which community members and which projects are most commonly in the trial and adoption stages. Finally I describe what creator and project factors predict influence in OCOCs.

Even though developed for two specific communities, her framework could be re-applied to the understanding of the sharing of creations within another community. It would be interesting to research on the mechanism of creation through blogs, or social communities.

Throughout her research, she analyzes the forms of participation, the mechanism of adoption of ideas and how ideas spread within the community, and finds ways to predict influence. For instance, prediction for download of user's projects happens:
1st- when the project is featured by administrator of the community
2nd- when the creator of the project has many projects already
3rd- when the creator of the project comments on projects
4th- when the creator of the project has uploaded projects recently
5th- when the creator of the project has friends, etc...

By observing a specific community, she studies how the learning happens socially.
Community members spontaneously filled in surveys that her software uses as data to generate a network visualization. She noticed that community members were developing popularity and skills that went beyond the community itself and could motivate users to later do something on the internet.

Jouez l'ecolo

my body is a hypertext

I love this concept of Yasmine Abbas



project number . 20050816
project title . shotcode tattoo
medium . ink or washable tattoo
my identity has shrunk to my skin...
<< I link therefore I am >> says WJM
my tattoo is no more a barcode that one scans
for revealing the identity of a product
the extension of my body is a url
we exist because of the envelope, the image
which is drawn, written, or projected onto it
our skin is a state of mind, a habitat, and our identity
the last private space?
my body is a hypertext

Also available for 5$, washable bar code tatoos - Via needled

Marisa Jahn

Artist Marisa Jahn gave a talk at the MIT Media Lab, in the Tangible Media Group.

Her work explores ways to engage people in gaining knowledge, from literacy, to environmental literacy. She designed tools and methods to invite people in a comparative analysis of information and self-reflective process. She collaborates frequently with Steve Shada and Natalie Jeremijenko.

Interested in how human interact and communicate with each others, she designed wearable musical instruments.
video



For her master thesis in the visual studies department at MIT, she designed a game called Set. Elements of the set can be regrouped, labeled and organized and shared within the players.
video

Project most easily understood through direct engagement, boxSET is a game played as an intervention into any existing collection of objects (archives, record albums, a heap of junk—anything). Involving multiple players, some of whom may not have any prior relationship with the objects to be sorted, the game asks players to develop categories that describes a grouping of objects. However, the creation of order occurs simultaneous with disorder: a player may choose to remove an object from another player's collection in order to place it in his/her grouping. This rapid taxonomic metabolism encourages players to narrate out loud (or 'show-and-tell') their categories with the anticipation that it may soon disappear. Further, through taxonomically engaging with different kinds of objects, players become aware of what kinds of objects (data) are better for certain kinds of analyses (formal, textual, psychoanalytic, etc.). As the game evolves, players become aware of the difference in interpretation, the subjectivity of order, and the contingent production of knowledge.

She created throw-n-Sow a new way for people to think about and engage with their environment. Frisbees deposite seeds while in the air...

Throw-n-Sow is a flying disc toy similar to a Frisbee that uses the centripetal force generated in the act of throwing to distribute seeds into the environment. Manufactured as a toy made from environmentally-friendly, biodegradable plastics, Throw-n-Sow consists of a main body and a separate container that slides and locks under the disc. This container contains adjustable holes of different diameter to accommodate variant seed sizes. In other words, Throw-n-Sow is a literally empty container into which individuals and communities emplace selected seeds.
Throw-n-Sow is interactive eco-art project that engages diverse communities in each step of the project (manufacturing, seed-selection, site-selection, plant stewardship, art education), Throw-n-Sow raises questions about the expanded field of drawing, indigenous ecologies vs. selective human cultivation, landscape evolution and succession, ethnobotany, agronomy, etc. Throw-n-Sow ultimately aims to valorize distributive intelligence and interdisciplinary learning.
Throw-n-Sow is the kind of art that literally passes between two or more individuals. Leaving behind a trail of seeds as it sails through the air, Throw-n-Sow essentially imprints moments of play into the landscape. Individuals carrying the Throw-n-Sow disc from one place to another develop an affective relationship to the toy and to the sites in which it is deployed.