I am extremely interested in design work that makes the invisible visible. The Fashion Victims project from Agnelli Davide, Buzzini Dario, and Drori Tal from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea does just that. They have designed a collection of garments that react (respond and change) according to the surrounding mobile phone calls. The act of making a phone call has become and invisible part of our lives. Where the physical consequences are less visible, the social consequences are becoming more and more apparent.

I love this project because it is visual feedback for something we might not otherwise keep track of. On average, we connect more with people electronically in a day that we do in person. Wouldn’t it be nice to be reminded to get off our phone and interact with someone in person every now and then?

“By producing a physical result with every call, the mobile phone is revealed in all of its pervasiveness and intrusiveness: its tendency to violate the private space we potentially have within the public context. Will your behaviors change once you’ll carry this bag around? And what about the people surrounding you? How many conversations will you be engaged into?” (excerpt from cite).

The bag serves in both a functional and fashionable way. The user can turn the interactive component on or off. Once the bag has reached a point where the user does not want it to be stained anymore, the mechanism can be pulled out, and the bag can function as just a bag once more (And the user can return to using there cell phone for obscene amounts of time, as per usual).

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 1:39 am and is filed under design, wearables. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.