Time for everyone to choose a direction and go with it! Time for us to share our ideas! And time to get working!! I am collaborating with ECUAD Masters student Holly Schmidt for the interactive wearables project. The idea is to work with the human heart rate, and externalize the interior sound of the body and the heart beating.

I wanted to see what else was out there using heart rate, and I came across Diana Eng’s project, Heartbeat Hoodie.

The hoodie uses a heart rate sensor and a camera to take pictures whenever your heart rate increases. The photos automatically upload to a blog that you can refer to or share with your friends. According to Eng, it is intended as a form of involuntary blogging.

“The camera is wired discreetly through the seeming of the garment to a basic stamp that communicates with a wireless heart rate monitor. The basic stamp uses an algorithm to analyze the heart beat for increases that might signify a moment of excitement or interest as opposed to physical exercise.”

The conecpt behind this project is useful for Holly and I because it is taking data from the heartrate and turning it into something else, something external. It also creates visual data from ‘excitment’ from the monitor involunatarily, which could provide some evidence or something you were not aware you were ‘excited’ about. It’s an interesting way of externalizing something internal, and the involunatry aspect is especially appealing to me.

Danish artist Marco Evaristti took 780 gallons of red paint, three fire hoses and a 20-member crew  to Greenland in search of a blank canvas large enough to accommodate his creative impulse. The result is a blood-red iceberg now sitting off the country’s western coast. The work is part of his Trilogy series.

“Trilogy comprises three projects that deal with the themes of territories and states. Using fruit color and fabric, Evaristti coloured an ice cube in Greenland, areas of Mont Blanc and a sand dune in the Sahara, red. He then declared them all as his territory and named it ‘Pink State’. The work is a series of transient changes in nature, touching on issues of environmental pollution, territorial demands and political methods.”

Evaristti was arrested during the Mont Blanc painting.

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).