Koji Tsukada and the Active Belt
you may have seen it first at coin-operated, then followed as it made its way over to near near future, until engadget picked it up, but the active belt is not the only project ‘feeling’ its way along.
the Electrode Bra by Lucy Dunne
lucy dunne has just started at ph.d. at UCD. now, if i had to bet money on who’ll be most likely to turn this wearable thing into a commercially viable option, my top bets would be elise co as a designer making cool things that people actually want, and lucy dunne as a designer who will make things that actually work.
Pod Massager by farah sit @ risd
Farah Sit, at the school of design has won an award of distinction from I.D. Magazine for Pod Massager a scarf-like massager made of electric screw parts. {via}
From I.D. Magazine:
“In a year of war and uncertainty, this project tapped into a widespread desire for creature comforts” observed Kalman of Farrah Sit’s portable massaging device. The brief, for a course called Appropriate Technology and Sustainability, was to design a product using all or some of the mechanical and electrical components of a handheld, battery-operated screwdriver. With help from Brown University engineering student Abby Thomas, Sit machined and press-fit an off-centered weight onto a small motor, encased and wired it to batteries, then sheathed it in rubber to distribute the vibration. Noting that most handheld massagers on the market are impersonal products made from bulky injection-molded plastics, she housed her massaging motor in a form more appropriate to its function: a soft, comforting scarf. The pea-green textile, which Kalman seized and draped over her own shoulders, can be wrapped around the body or slung over the back of a chair.”
Dr. Janet Abrams, Director of the Design Institute at University of Minnesota was the keynote presenting a talk titled: Ubiquity/Urbiuity: the B.U.G. and other Ludic(rous) Pursuits. She started out with some provocative statements about the general inaccessibility of ubicomp research and the question if perhaps the efforts of different researchers to “locate, tag, and place” people is merely “a displacement of being unable to talk face to face.” Most of the critiques were familiar ones, yet it was still good to have the same questions about purpose, necessity, and intent asked again.
… and that future is… ASIAN! - haha - at least if you’re in the Ubicomp 2004 workshop “Ubicomp and the Urban Frontier“. i’ve been sitting in the workshop all day now, and images of “the Asian people” have been repeatedly used (intentionally or not) to illustrate “the Urban Frontier” in various people’s presentations. now, Asians have typically been used as the face of the future (the “other” that is both open possibility and threat) but as interest in non-western notions of subjectivity and experience grows it seems the “gaze” that is levelled really hasn’t shifted. i saw this at ars electronica (where pronouncements about the need to look outside of Europe, and the USA abounded, while over half of the speakers in the main symposium were American, the rest mainly from Europe) and now i see it here. with the rush of researchers going to places like japan, south korea, and other countries in the “far east” i see the danger of simply reinscribing notions of essentialist racial and cultural difference. the nouveau orientalism of technological discourse can be pretty subtle, and often “liberal” well meaning people can find themselves held sway.
a quick roundup of related weaving and electronics projects. thoughts will come later, but for now just the links:
“Fault Lines” by Barbara Layne and Ingrid Bachmann
update: the photo i have of Barbara’s textile is really bad quality. to see some better images and the actual textile in action, view the short .avi of Barbara talking about the piece (3.96mb) at ISEA 2004. (thanks Jonah!)
Barbara Layne, a professor at Concordia University in Montr�al is working on weaving electronic components directly into fabrics. She and her graduate students have constructed a wearable LED matrix that can be programmed to display text or patterns. (Unfortunately I don’t have the images of this project with me and they aren’t on her site, so I’ll have to update with a photo.) One of her previous works (with Ingrid Bachmann) titled “Fault Lines” swaps real-time seismic data from California and Canada, with a weaver in each location inscribing the patterns into a textile. (more…)
Nina Wakeford from Incite
mobility is a situated practice - very hard to discuss without standardizing and categorizing. we need more and less of this \”trope\” mobility.
ethnographic data suggests what we think of unproblematically as mobility is more ethnographically portrayed as encountering of infrastructure.
more mobility - making mobile theories risky and dangerous
more unedited on the fly notes
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, from Brown University giving the first keynote.
Addressing ISEA’s sins - tendency to take interactive work because of novel technique rather than actual experience.
interrogate conditions required for experience of use.
code is as much affect as cause - code’s airtight causality - new technology is hard to understand because of technique inscribed - not because it moves too fast
mobile mag has an article on an edible camera by given imaging
while light-emitting diodes flash the gastrointestinal tract, images captured with the microchip camera are sent via the RF transmitter to a data recorder worn on the belt of the patient.
this sounds like something that is just begging to be hacked into…