HEAR THIS
Been doing some research and came across this poster for Hear Wear, a project by fellow ITP graduates Milena Iossifova and Younghui Kim. It’s flattering to note that they’ve referenced one of my projects in their poster, but I’m baffled by the following:
Inside/Outside displays air pollution with color changes of the bag’s fabric. There have also been numerous projects integrating EL-wire and LED technology in clothing. HearWear stems from this research but is unique as one of the first wearable projects to look at environmental noise pollution, seamlessly and subtly integrating of technology with everyday fashion.
What the poster does not mention that there were two Inside/Outside bags one which sensed air quality and the other which sensed noise pollution. (Link to the Inside/Outside poster paper from Ubicomp, presented the previous year here) Another related project is Urban Chameleon - a collaboration with Fionnuala Conway, which featured three skirts, one of which changed according to noise pollution levels.
Interestingly, the poster cites the following as a long-term goal for the project:
In the long term we would like to start working towards transmitting the information that each HearWear unit collects and visually displaying the data coming from separate HearWear units. We live in a very noisy world (at least us here in New York City) but no one seems to be aware of the long-term detrimental effects of noise pollution. Our goal is to contribute towards raising people’s awareness of noise pollution and eventually bring about action to decrease it. Therefore HearWear version 2 will probably include a communications protocol which can send out the information that the each HearWear-er collects on his/her daily route. In this way we can work towards a realtime noise maps of the cities we live in.
edit: related post on environmental monitoring