Ah, the High Line, the perfect venue for a photo shoot in the middle of winter. The bright background lights. The dark foreground. The cool wind…

You know what? One would think that I would have learned my lesson after parading around in an open backed dress for my last photo shoot, but it seems that I truly am a glutton for pain. Tonight was in the mid to low 30s, Fahrenheit—practically balmy for New York, January standards. Yet, add a nice touch of wind chill and take away gloves, scarf, hat, and coat and you have yourself a photo shoot with pain to follow.

Yes, I stood outside for forty minutes holding still for long exposure shots. The freezing wasn’t the bad part. I really didn’t feel it at all. What I did feel was my blood flow as it returned to my hands when I finally reach warmth. It was excruciating. I feel sorry for the other clientele at the restaurant* that we retired to as I writhed in my chair, unsure what to do to ease the throbbing and sparks of pain inside my hands.

All the same, the long awaited photo shoot took place.  Ever since the winter show, I have been meaning to get some decent pictures of the life dress in it’s illuminated form. Unfortunately, due to some wiring problems and my desperate desire to GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY, I was only able to light up one series of lights. Still, it was my favorite series so, no complaints here.

I am tentatively planning another, indoor, shoot for next week. I would be interested in any suggestions for sites that would have the appropriate interior and won’t require excessive hoops to be jumped through in order to take the pictures. I may be featuring a larger “spaceship” pattern for the next run. Come to think of this, this may shape up to be a series on different popular patters from the game of life.

As with any outdoor photo shoot, we had plenty of onlookers.  While I tried to look as casual as possible when looking into the camera, I overheard plenty of comments acknowledging that the ensemble might not be the most seasonably appropriate.  Come this summer, I will be rocking a fully programmable dress in a climate that won’t kill me.

The glider taking off in the hall of blue-purple light.  The hallway was a beacon after so many shots in the dark.  Suddenly, enough light for a regular exposure.  Though, the angle gave the shoots a rather ominous look.  I rather like it, though.

In case you didn’t get it the first few times I said it.  This was a COLD night.  At times I was contorting poses in order to maintain any last vestige of warmth.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the wrapped look, but it was practical to both of my purposes.

*For those interested, the restaurant was Cola’s, on 8th Ave. The sole fillet was amazing, and the angel hair salmon was divine. Coupled with a nice glass of Chardonnay and the frozen hands were a blissfully distant memory.

Related posts:

1. Life Dress [Photo Shoot]
2. Life Dress [LED Choice]
3. Life Dress [aftershow wrap up]

This semester has been the semester of disappointment—both for me and my professors—as I presented half finished projects and weak excuses for my own shortcomings.  Of course grad school is hard. That is why one doesn’t flagrantly fill one’s schedule with work, projects, and responsibilities that are going to compromise one’s performance.  And yet, last semester was also a time of accomplishment for the same reason—be it the Stern Business Competition and our project (already in the semi-finals),  FashionCamp and the phenomenal people I worked with, Startup Weekend and the dedicated team Startup Matchup, or the Winter Show and my short lived flirtation with the press.  My compromises have lead to some surprisingly beneficial results.

Regardless I see all this aptly summarized in Jonathan Ystad’s picture of me presenting my progress on the Life Dress during the materials final.  Yes, a progress report at finals.  I only had two rows of the dress composed of the nine rows that I finally settled upon.  I suppose I am cursed with this project.  At least, with each iteration, I draw closer to completion.  We’ll see if I will ever be satisfied with the project.

Related posts:

1. Life Dress [Prototype]
2. Life Dress [documentation]
3. Life Dress [Matrix]

The Life Dress is a garment constructed of dragon skin silicone with leds embedded inside.  The dress is largely a conceptual experiment in constructing a dress our of unusual materials. I chose dragon skin for three reasons. [1] The dragon skin diffuses the light of the leds into a halo effect, [2] the dragon skin has an odd, pseudo organic feel, and [3] it is named dragon skin and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tell certain geeky friends that I had a dress made of dragons skin.

The dragon skin is poured as tiles with an led embedded in each tile. The tiles are then linked together in a grid formation to construct what is, in effect, a platform for dynamic patterns, animations, and interactive displays.

The form of the dress is inspired by the grid layout used in running John Conway’s algorithm, the Game of Life. The algorithm is a simple set of rules that determined weather each cell in a grid is either alive (on) or dead (off). I was intrigued how, with a simple set of rules, the algorithm generated simple animations which I could visualize on a dress as a dynamic pattern. Thus, each tile on the dress represents a cell on the board so that the dress becomes a board that envelopes the wearer. The pattern is also easily reinterpreted as a cylindrical screen with three inch square pixels so that the dress can easily be repurposed for other other patterns and interactive displays.

After constructing the dress and experimenting with lighting, I made an additional and rather amusing discovery. I was aware that the the tiles were somewhat transparent, that serves my interest in diffusing the light. However, what I later discovered was that, when lit, the tiles obscured whatever was underneath so that an observer could only see vague shadows. Thus, depending on what tiles are on and what tiles are off, the Life Dress can be considered an exercise in public indecency.

I am, quite frankly, shocked by the reception of the dress. I had considered pulling the dress out of the show when I couldn’t wire all the tiles in time. But the night after the show’s first day, I received some very unexpected validation: a writeup in Gizmodo. Aside from being the best birthday present ever, the Gizmodo article also caught the attention of many attendees to the second day of the show. Several individuals came up to my dress and noted that they had read about it in Gizmodo the night before.  Better yet, the dress is now the top Google hit for “ITP Winter Show.”

The interest keeps snowballing, though it will probably wear out soon.  All the same, there are some things in the works now.  I have been approached by some other publications to submit work in collections for wearable technology.

At the after-party, I was glowing and it wasn’t only due to the vodka (and I wasn’t wearing the dress).

Close up of the Life dress on a model.

Coverage

Gizmodo
Talk to my shirt which seems to be getting a lot of activity.
Technovelgy.com
Switched
Empathic Design
blogadr

Related posts:

1. Life Dress [Prototype]
2. Life Dress [Proposal]
3. Life Dress [Mold v3]

I base this on the coverage by Gizomodo: a nice big picture at the top of the main page. Granted, the photography is a quick snap shot (too bad they didn’t ask for one of Jon’s amazing shots). I can’t really blame the disparaging comments below, given the quality of the photograph. Still, you can’t blame me for being slightly excited about the coverage.
I’m not sure if a dress composed of a few dozen dragon skin silicone tiles—each infused with an LED light—is the most comfortable or practical thing to wear, but it sure does create all kinds of possibilities.

I just might wear it tomorrow for the press run through in the early afternoon. This is some birthday present!

Related posts:

1. Life Dress [aftershow wrap up]
2. COMING SOON!!!
3. Life Dress in the ITP Show 2010

The winter show is coming soon.  I’m taking it in stride–returning to my optimal work schedule: noon to 4am.  I haven’t been seeing Sean at all since I get home after he’s asleep and he leaves before I wake up.

Instead, I have been cutting and linking tiles and working on the wiring.  I thought I had resolved all of lighting issues last year, but I don’t seem to be so lucky.  So, I cut my losses and did a quick test shoot this evening with Jonathan Ystad.  He was fabulous, as usual.

You can check out the Life Dress on:

Winter Show

December 20, 2009 from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm
December 21, 2009 from 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm
721 Broadway, 4th floor
New York. New York

Related posts:

1. Life Dress [Coming Soon!]
2. Life Dress [Photo Shoot]
3. Life Dress [documentation]

Today, quite likely, has been my most efficient work day on this project. I bought two gallons of dragon skin. I completed the rest of the mold—cutting, prepping, and setting the remaining 28 tile spaces that were left. I hacked several clear LEDs to be diffused. Then, I poured 35 tiles. I think I will certainly have something to show, come final presentation on Tuesday.

Shopping

I always love to shop. But, usually when I hand over my credit card to make a $170 purchase, it is for a high quality coat. This wasn’t the case today when I trekked over to The Compleat Sculptor to buy dragon skin.

There are several things I like about dragon skin:

1. The name: really, who wouldn’t get a kick of casually dropping a comment about their dress of dragon skin?
2. The texture: it feels like skin
3. The diffusion: the dragon skin does quite a good job of diffusing light. So I can embed leds in it

I had a small pack of the two parts that one mixes to make dragon skin, but I was almost finished with it after only pouring around 20 small tiles. So, it was time to invest in a bulk order of silicone. I brought my card, a cart, and steal constitution—it can be galling to pay that much.

Shopping (machine)

With the dragon skin purchased, along with some more plastic materials at Plastic Land, I went to school and spent a few hours in the shop. I cut and sanded new plastic dividers for the mold and then drilled holes in each divider to stick the led leads into. This time, the holes are in the center of the divider so that the LED is placed in the middle.

After all the prepping, I glued all the dividers to my original main plexi mold where the original 7 were made. Thus, I can now cast 35 tiles in one go. Fourteen of them are the original thickness (a little less that an ¼ inch), another fourteen are slightly thicker (a little over ¼ an inch), and 7 are a half inch thick for parts of the dress that really need to keep their shape.

Sanding

There is poetry to this part, even through it is quite tedious. My original plan was to embed four surface-mount LEDs into each tile to help the light be diffused. However, the effect wasn’t quite to my liking. Thus, I decided to embed a single pronged LED into each square. It’s easier to do and actually has a better effect. However, to get proper diffusion, I need diffused LEDs. While I do not have the time to wait for a massive order of diffused white LEDs, I have a lot of clear white LEDs. I bought them a year ago to make my original game of life dress. Thus, I found myself sanding down my old LEDs to make my new game of life dress.

Pouring

This part of the process was far more troublesome than I would have expected. First I mixed and poured what was left of my original small bottles of dragon skin. Unfortunately, several of the tile partitions were only partially filled and most had only a small drizzle. So, I had to open up my new gallon containers of part A and part B. These are far to huge to just pour into a mixing bowl. I had to dip individual cups into each container and then pour them into the mixing bowl. The process was incredibly messy and time consuming as I tried to pour out all the parts.

Some of the silicone had hardened. So, as I tried to spread out the silicone evenly I found lumps of it forming in different parts. Hopefully it won’t completely ruin this batch.

Regardless, I am very pleased with today and feel confident that I will have definite progress or my final on Tuesday and a fully complete dress for the winter show on the 20th.

Next Step

Obviously, I’m under the gun here, but there are a few things that I prioritize completion of over some others:

1. I need to buy material for joining the tiles that will help the dress keep its shape. I hope to swing by the fashion district for this tomorrow.
2. I also need to get all the code set on my Arduino and have it running properly on leds.
3. I need to set up a pressure sensitive tile that will allow the wearer to reset the game.
4. Finally, I need to decide if I’m going to take the easy way out and plug the dress in for the show or determine a mobile means of powering the dress.

The pouring process is probably the most compelling part of making these tiles. I always have an audience as I first come close to the mold and gently start to tip out the dragon skin and the, as the silicone begins to ooze out, I stand up on a table so that it is stretched out between my height plus the height of the table.

Related posts:

1. Life Dress [Prototype]
2. Life Dress [Tiles]
3. Life Dress [Mold v2]

While looking for some documentation photos for a submission to an art festival, I came across this wonderful picture that Jonathan Ystad took of my midterm prototype during materials class. Only Jon could make a prototype look like that.

Related posts:

1. Life Dress [Review]
2. Life Dress [Prototype]
3. Life Dress [Photo Shoot]

After trying out a protoype tile last week, i decided to begin tile production on a larger scale to test how the tiles would link together and generate a simple working model of around 16 tiles. Unfortunately, my new shipment of LEDs for testing has not arrived yet. So, I am postponing pouring the test molds until I can test the leds as well.

Instead, this week was spent preparing for my tests by making my new molds.  I made eight molds by cutting and glueing plexiglass dividers to a pain of plexiglass.

The process was complicated by my desire to be able to mount male headers in the glass. The two headers would link to power and ground for each tile in a way that would make them easily modularized. However, they need to stick out of the dragonskin to make a connection. Thus, the holes in the plexi. I used a drill press with an incredibly small drill bit to make these holes. The process was tedious, seeing as how they had to be the standard distance between eachother in order to keep the headers attached.

Areal was kind enough to lend me his ridiculously small drill bit to cut the holes.  Unfortunately, I found that the melted plexiglass from drilling began to build up on the drill bit until it finaly broke.  Peter suggests that I take great care to clean the drill bit after each drill and be sure to dows it in water if it gets too hot in order to avoid having this problem with the next bit I buy (tomorrow).

While the drill bit did eventually break, I did have good use of it before hand so that I was able to drill enough holes to compose a row of 3×3 inch tile molds.  I then used acrylic on acrylic adhesive in a dropper bottle to attach the plexiglass borders to a sheet of plexiglass.

After an inspired suggestion by my friend Dario, I am also looking into setting up a row of thicker tiles so that I can get different weights of tile.  These would be 1/2 inch thick tiles as opposed to this current mold for 3/16 inch thick tiles.  The thicker tiles will be less flexible and should hold their form better.  I intend to use these to create a thicker collar on the dress.

Today’s thanks go out to Ariel Nevarez, Dario Batungbakal, and, as always, Peter Menderson.

Related posts:

1. Life Dress [Mold v3]
2. Life Dress [Prototype]
3. Mold [v4]

Life Dress Redux

For those who followed the ridiculousness of last year’s shenanigans in physical computing, I made a ham-fisted attempt at creating what I called the Life Dress, based on John Conway’s Game of Life algorithm. The Game of Life is a simple algorithm in which cells—squares within a grid—are represented as either living or dead—white or black, 1 or 0—based upon the health of their immediate neighbors.

In materials, I have decided that I have both the skills and background work with which to give this attempt another fair go. Thus, for midterms, I presented my prototype for a single cell of the new life dress.

The Life Dress (working name) is a dress composed of tiles of dragon skin silicone. Surface mount LEDs are embedded in each tile and hooked up to an Arduino through a TLC4950. The tiles are turned on and off based on the rules of Conway’s Game of Life.

Progress

Now is the dreaded time of midterms. In order to not be outdone by the pain inflicted by my other classes, Materials called for a prototype of our final project. Considering my dress is of a modular design, it was easy to breakdown the project to come up with a prototype. Thus, I decided to make my first version of the tiles with which I will be composing my dress.

After a visit to The Comlpeat Sculptor, I returned to school weighted down with the two parts for the dragon skin, hydrocal, wax, plasticine, and mixing buckets, ruminating on how much I preferred money to possessions…it is so much lighter.

After collecting a dish to pour my molds into, I set up a work space at school. I rolled out the plasticine to the desired thickness, cut it into a three inch square, and placed eyelets into the corners to enforce the dragon skin when it is attached to other tiles. I then added another layer of clay as a bit of extra space for pouring and then set it in the tray. This took surprisingly long.

I then mixed hydrocal into some water until it was pea-soupy and then poured it on top of my master. I then let it dry overnight as went home and finally got to sleep after a 36 hour marathon of consciousness.

Today I soldered surface mount LEDs to copper jeweler’s wire and placed it into the mold (after removing the clay). Unfortunately, the peaks that I had set up to in the hydrocal to guide the placement of eyelets came off in the removal. So I had to place the eyelets in the mold and hope they would stay in place. I then mixed dragon skin and poured it into the mold just in time to take off for dinner and a glass of wine before class. What a wonderful day!

Next…

After talking with Peter, it seems like my mold is far from optimal. Rather than making individual hydrocal molds, Peter suggests that I block off a plate of plexiglass into 16 tiles so that I can pour them in bulk and level them with the stroke of a flat edge. Count on me to do it the hard way.

On another tack, it seems that the white surface mount LEDs that I bought weren’t white after all. (Thank you DigiKey!) While red can be a stunning color for a dress, I am aiming for clean, lively squares, not the red death. So, I’ve made a new order and hopefully these LEDs will better serve me. In fact, I’m feeling adventurous. Maybe I’ll try some more subtle colors too!

Finally, I am not satisfied that the eyelets are the best way to connect the cells. The do create a very industrial look. It could be something worth embracing. At the same time, I feel like whatever I use to link these tiles is going to define the look of the dress and so some experimenting is called for. Other approaches I am considering is a series of eight smaller, white, plastic eyelets that will be less noticeable or possibly using some large string, yarn, or ribbon to sew the pieces together. I feel, however, that the former would be inelegant and lack and look, whatsoever, and that the later will look too homespun—reminiscent of quilts and ostentatiously patched clothing.

Related posts:

1. Life Dress [Mold v3]
2. Life Dress [aftershow wrap up]
3. Life Dress [Tiles]