FUTUREself Exhibition of Wearable Prototypes
Exhibition Dates
Hong Kong: 9 December 2017
Unit 3305, 33/F AIA Kowloon Tower, Landmark East, Kwun Tong, Kowloon Hong Kong
Australia: 6-10th March 2018
Cnr Greens Rd and Oxford St, Paddington, NSW Australia
About the Exhibition
What’s the future got in store for us? Wearable technology, interactive media and smart textiles created by UNSW artists, designers, scientists and engineers will be on show for Sydney Design Festival.
Listen to audio interview – A Brave New World – The Future Of Wearable Technologies
Design is in discourse with contemporary issues in this outside-the-box approach to designing our future. From critical and speculative to functionally focused prototypes, the exhibition presents design thinking that grapples themes like sustainability, biodiversity, technogenesis and self-sustaining energy systems for life off the grid. Mass markets are rapidly adapting and transitioning from portable (mobile phones, tablets) to wearable (Google glass and motion sensors) devices. Wearables that live on, near or in our bodies give rise to a previously unimagined level of data about users and the environment. The absorption of technology into the very fabric of clothes, accessories and even bodies begins to dilute boundaries between physical, technological and social spheres and has potential implications for human evolution.
You will see a speculative automatic defence mechanism that alerts users of dangerous levels of pollution. The prototype utilises pollution sensors and motors to raise a functional smog mask around the wearer. Another mask acts as a filtration system for a visually saturated landscape. It is framed as a reclamation of public spaces, that have been taken from the public through excessive advertisements, sponsorships, and logos.
At the opening you can also see a demonstration of the interactive interface “Happy Brackets” or register to take a guided walk in one of Sydney’s urban rewilded environments wearing a cyborganic aid for empathetic experience of insects.
About the Artists
The HIF Cloud 2017 Workshop – wearables workshop ran in Sydney, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangdong and Hong Kong during summer 2017 and brought together varied disciplines – textiles, computer science, intermedia design, product design, SPI (sculpture/performance/installation), jewellery, bioengineering with an interest in exploring critical and speculative wearables to imagine the future self through art or design practice.
It challenged students in an inter-disciplinary, inter-national and inter-cultural collaboration to envision the future of wearables. The projects cast future scenarios for wearables that harness the power of cloud computing to enrich and transcend human interactions in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Projects
Origarment
CLIVE CHAN, ROBERT SLOAN, SIVAAN WALKER, ISABELLA WORSLEY, NEELAM GOPALANI
Origarment began as an exploration of multi-functional design concepts that could challenge the existing fast-fashion industry. The project was eventually realised as a transformable garment with shifting patterns that can be altered digitally. The garment is designed to seamlessly integrate into everyday life, and implements wireless charging technology to allow for effortless overnight charging while hanging in the wardrobe. Adaptive garments like this, that have the ability to modify their shape and pattern on demand will improve reuse and sustainability of the future fashion industry.
Techno Adaption
DEANNA WAWN, AMELIA LIU, ROSE ELLIOT, LAURA KEOGH, MAJA SIECZKO
Techno Adaptation considers the way that humankind will technologically adapt following the rise of pollution levels. Darwin’s theory of evolution no longer adheres to the biological form, as the time frames of adaptation shorten, humans have been unable to keep up with the rapidly changing environment around them. Technological intervention has become necessary for survival, the body and the computer have merged and developed into automatic defence mechanisms. Techno Adaptation presents a scarf that senses the pollution levels of the air around it, and is automatically raised when levels no longer become safe for the user. A heart rate sensor continually monitors and the users body, within higher pollution levels the lights present as warning signals to surrounding users.
Future Primal
JARED GRIFFITHS, HARRY EGGINGTON, MITCHELL SHELTON, AMY MALEK, JACK PARKER
Future Primal is a blending of high-fashion and reactionary deimatic behaviours. The piece questions whether animalistic instincts that humans have long lost could augment our ability to build relationships in a modern society.
Cocoon
MONISHA CHIPPADA, MARLENE BAQUIRAN, MICHAEL NGUYEN HUYNH, LEILA FRIJAT, KRISTONE CAPISTRANO
The Cocoon is a playful speculative tool for navigating our media heavy landscape. Combining easily accessible technology with experimental fashion, the headpiece is a challenge for individuals of society to reject the countless logos and advertisements that confront us in day to day life. A miniature display inside the headpiece is linked to a small camera that sits on the front. When users direct their gaze to logos, software that has been trained to detect such images automatically blurs them. This process works as a deconstruction of censorship, toying with the idea of the ‘forbidden’ to address the current state of visual hierarchy in the public space. The cocoon instead hopes to give attention back to people, nature and the power of our immediate environments.
Wanderer
ELIZABETH READ, JAY RICKARDS, RUTH SAVEKA, ANGELO YAN
Wearable technology is becoming a big part of our lives with the development of “smart” devic- es such as smart phones and smart watches. These devices provide many benefits and are so useful that we have reached a point where we are dependent on them. Unfortunately, these devices are battery powered and need to be regularly charged. As a consequence, society has become limited by the availability of power sockets and charging cables.
Haptic Wanderer aims to remove our reliance on charging by harnessing the kinetic energy we produce while walking and running, thus taking society “off the grid”. This gives us the ability to produce the electricity we consume so that we become self-sufficient allowing us to get in touch with our ancestors who lived off the land and produced everything they consumed.
Cyborganic
TRICIA FLANAGAN, RAUNE FRANKJAER
“This project involves a series of walks in re-wilded environments mediated by a wearable interface, that enables the interlocutor to perceive the environment from an alien perspective. The aim is to foster empathy for other-than-human entities and promulgate holistic and biodiverse ecologies. Technocrafting the prosthetic device from organic and electronic materials by blending traditional with digital techniques, create devices that the authors term ‘cyborganic’. The Cyborganics project is a weird – and wonderful – creature. The Cyborganic is a fantasy, a design fiction, living in a world where technology is not cold, hard, and dead, but warm, soft and alive. A human-machine- nature hybrid of organic augmentation. A temporal assemblage, where old wisdom and future vision can meet. Human and nonhuman. The device sits as if grafted around the human head, and appears to come to life embodied with its own sense of ‘agency’. It is an aid for empathetic experience of insects in rewilded spaces. The designer are conducting tests using a methodology developed in Aarhus based on a series of walks with users where they engage in semi-structured interviews post-walk to evaluate their experience. They invite visitors to FUTUREself to take part in the research by volunteering to join the artists on a walk in Sydney’s urban re-wilded spaces.”
Press
Futuristic fashion: UNSW students design the new wave of wearables
The anti-smog scarf: Creating the wearable tech of the future
The Woolmark Co Pty Ltd
Unit 3305, 33/F AIA Kowloon Tower, Landmark East, Kwun Tong, Kowloon Hong Kong
9th December 2017
| Exhibitors | ||
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Students from the HIF Cloud – Workshop 2017
ExhibitorsStudents from the HIF Cloud – Workshop 2017
http://triciaflanagan.com/event/hif-cloud-workshop-2017/ |
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