Leah Buechley’s Bike Signal Project is a wearable jacket that acts as a signaling system for bikers to indicate their path of travel to other drivers/bikers. Made in the MIT Media Lab in 2008, it contains a LilyPad, which controls the lights in the back. If the user is about to turn left, s/he can press the left button and the left signal on the back will light up. If the user wants to turn right, s/he can press the right button.

This jacket serves as an inspiration for my thesis as I am looking into the possibilities of raising awareness for danger and how can we become more aware of our environments through fashion and wearable. I am researching into the possibilities of expanding human capabilities with animal self-defense mechanisms, and I believe that the mechanics of this wearable is the first step to understanding how and why such systems should be necessary for garments.

SMART RITUALS

A/D/A Festival Hamburg, on Friday, August 26th – Saturday, August 27th.

Smart Ritual is a project created by Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson’s (KOBAKANT). I found this browsing on their HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT site.

In response to smart cities, Smart Ritual, KOBAKANT created a workshop  that invited other artist to create costumes that will collect data. These costumes will be integrated with sensors smart textiles, and Internet of Things technologies that will collect data and send them over the web by performing ceremonial gestures.

There were a total of ten participants who were grouped together to create a series of different, and exciting costumes that collected different types of data.

Here are some examples of the costumes that were produced:

By Sina Greinert, Katrin Rieber and Katrin Rieber, a Hairy Monster that detected how noisy a space was.

The Curious Twins, created by Lilli Berger, Marie Josephine Bouquet and Mareike Brunswick, that counts all the nice people in the neighborhood.

Lastly, the Flower Fairy, which allows the user to detect the luminosity of a particular spot. The Flower Fairy was created by Barbro Scholz.

Their process for creating these costumes was to first decide what types of data they wanted to collect. Then each team had to act out and perform the gestures they wanted to decide how to incorporate the sensors. After that, they had to sketch out their plans- where does the sensor go? where to place the LEDs strips? how are the sensors integrated into the costume? Once that’s done, they go into the prototyping phase. Each team had to connect all the parts that they wanted, then they had to test the gestures to make sure it works with the sensor, then testing to see if the costumes actually work. The last step in the making process is to decorate their costumes.

Making stage:

Testing their gestures:

All photos and content was taken from:

Smart Rituals

1. Get logged onto course website.
2. Find a project that excites you and that uses the materials we looked at in class. You can use one from today’s class or find something new. Create a post that includes, images, video, or other documentation. Write a brief paragraph explaining what it is about this project that intrigues you.
3. Purchase materials listed in the TOOLKIT today or tomorrow. I know shipping might take a week or so, so if you don’t have them all by next week, no worries.
4. Read and watch this multimeter tutorial. This tool will be one of your best friends.