INTRO
How does your wearable recontextualize you from perceived urban stress in crowded, open spaces?
BIONIC BUBBLE is a generated skin as a living body representing the boundary surrounding an individual’s body. This wearable attempts to translate information into matter by deforming and transforming material. By augmenting the perception of bodily limits, this project aims to produce responsive and action-oriented membranes for dynamically generated bodies.
City-living has been linked to depression and anxiety in many people. A huge number of people are suffering from the fear of being in crowded places and situations where escape might be difficult. These people might experience many physical and mental discomforts that affects their well-beings. Some of the symptoms are: rapid heartbeat, hyperventilating, irritability, anxiety, depression, headache and moments of intense fear that makes them feel sick. The rush of hormones, rapid breathing, and increased heart rate can upset digestive system. Moreover, under stress, liver produces extra blood sugar (glucose) to give a boost of energy. However, under chronic stress, body may not be able to keep up with this extra glucose surge and it may cause an increase in the risk of developing type to diabetes. Release of stress hormones also affect respiratory and cardiovascular systems and many other harmful effects. People with this fear choose avoidance behaviour in order to be away from the distress that public engagement causes for them.
DESIGN CONCEPT
Computational tools and technologies aid this project to dissolve the distinction between subjects of experience (human), objects (including the wearable), and environment and explores the relations of lived bodies within designed boundaries. Nested boundary structures (wearable physical materiality) enhanced with extended electronical/mechanical devices are used to explore the circulation of information through a whole closed system. Then, these informational pathways, circulating in the system and connecting the bodies to their prosthetic extensions become the input for constructing the cyborg borders, dynamically adjusting to change. Integrating electronics in this project, enables informatic exchange between material bodies. This exchange enables the materiality of the bounded body to become both performative and transformative. As Katherine Hayles frames it, “information makes the link between material boundaries and can flow between carbon-based organic components and silicon-based electronic components to make protein and silicon operate as a single united system” [1] .
Employing motion and proximity sensors, BIONIC BUBBLE explores the neighboring environment, by sensing distance and motion of people getting close to it. Arduino, as the processing brain of the wearable, actuates air-pumps to inflate or deflate air into the tube network and inflatable silicone bubbles. This stretchable skin is a pneumatic system that adjusts its physical form and the amount of inflation with the programmed behavior for a desired haptic- visual behavior.
The garment is utilized as a communication device that reflects the body’s senses or its impressions from the outside world. Its shape-shifting properties play with the idea of embodied interaction to extend human cognition constantly in search of an external shape for its reaction.
BIONIC BUBBLE is a prosthesis for the mind, envisioned to protect the body, create personal space, and make the subject of experience aware of its context. Moreover, experience of the human in space becomes a generative agent for the production of new experiences as bodies and environments co-shape each other. By sculpting data into the wearable’s material, this soft, breathing cognified material brings comfort to those individuals that are experiencing discomfort and stress in crowded public spaces, allowing them to feel secure and protected in order to find their way back to the public, social environment.
GENERATIVE SYSTEM
The overall form of the wearable is generated from a biological swarming behavior. This design process is a way to first, optimize material distribution on body and second, generate an unpredictable emergent, complex form as an intriguing, innovative, aesthetic designed fashion to wear. The generated form contains air tube network (connecting air pump to inflatable silicone bubbles) and seals the wiring network connecting Arduino to sensors and pump. In this bottom-up approach particles sense their environment, self-organize and aggregate to form a cohesive body of design, in which collective behaviour of the material results in complex pattern formations and emergent topologies. Moreover, material behaviour in this agent-based model demonstrates flexibility or adaptability to form and maintain patterning over time.
ECONOMICAL ESTIMATION
The body is comprised of four layers of: wiring system (including proximity / motion sensors – Arduino board – air-pump), air distrusting network (silicone tubes), 3d printed body, and inflatable silicone. The overall estimate for fabrication of a prototype of this project is 1,800 CAD which would be significantly reduced in the state of mass customization and mass production.
References
[1] N. K. Hayles, How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics,
University of Chicago Press, 2008.
