Category: Interactive Fashion

This week, we are making a soft switch. 

We first made the switch. It contains three layers: one conductive material,  one layer of velostat, and one thick layer of cloth in between.

This switch is very sensitive, which is a bit to our surprise. As you can see in the serial monitor, the contact of fabric is sensed very in-time and immediately.

We first connected it to the led to test:

Then we turned to the buzzer. We encountered some issues with the buzzer. The voice always came out on and off, it was very unsteady, but we examined the code including map function and constraint function, they all worked fine. We guessed maybe the buzzer is having a bad connection.

 

The recitation this week is to make a soft switch. Professor Marcele asked us to go wild with our imagination! Sooo… I thought of this year is the year of rabbit🐇… and rabbits love eating carrots, their eyes would “light up” for their satisfaction when eating carrots… So I decided to make a soft switch that is — the carrot touching the rabbit’s nose! (However I eventually changed the carrot idea into grass, because we only had green and grey cloth and I thought a green carrot, or a grey one, is so weird, so I decided to make a grass shape!)

So I decided to use 2 red leds (as the rabbit’s eyes) and drew this circuit:

I tested on the breadboard before I use the soft materials, and it worked well:

So I turned to sewing. I had experience sewing clothes in the past, however, the conductive thread is very thick and slippery, I encountered quite a few issues when trying to tie it (especially with my long nails..which I already cut and change😌)

Below is the pictures of my final result.

However, because I sewed those threads pretty randomly, maybe resulted by random threads contacting each other without being noticed, the leds didn’t light up as I wished. As Marcele and I tested various threads using the multimeter, we found two threads that’s piping out and causing the mistaken touch. However, after controlling those two threads, the leds still didn’t work. I think the main issue is definitely those messy threads, and I’ll definitely improve this aspect in future sewing.

Last but not least, to answer the questions:

• What is fashion for you? and why are you interested in fashion?

To me, fashion is what gives people(who wear the clothes) confidence and impresses others(who see the clothes) with a clear idea of his/her identity. I’m interested in fashion because I feel like it’s a very personal thing but at the same time allows you to be known and know others, the special feeling of having echos with others who share the same interest in some fashion items always make me feel connected and I enjoy this feeling, also I’m very curious how many forms can fashion takes.

• What kinds of things do your clothing say about you and your values?

I love things that are a bit exaggerative and strange, but in terms of color I like to keep the whole outfit in the same tune. I guess this shows that I have some attitudes and stick to some certain things and that I’m open to new things and adventures, but deep inside I still hold some traditional values and have some reservations.

• What are your main learnings and take aways from the readings?

In the readings, Davis mentioned that fashion is not only a personal expression, but also a combined result of society and culture. Which explains part of the reasons why people have preferences and some groups of people share the same preference — they may share similar social/culture background.

Ying Gao’s art pieces remind me of the mocking jay outfit in the film “Hunger game” and inspired me to take fashion into considerations that are more out of the frame and to innovate.