Augmented Body
2021 Fall | E Studio
PROMPT:
We are going to experiment with ways that we can change a person’s relationship to their (natural) physical environment. These wearable, physical artifacts will be designed to impact our senses through amplification, dampening, distortion, isolation, etc. to have an impact on the wearer’s perception. The design should impact two or more of the wearer’s senses.
CONSIDERATIONS
- What is our bodies relationship to its external environment?
- How are our senses engaged when outdoors?
- How might design be a catalyst for disruption of daily routine?-
- Comfort/wearability vs. discomfort/burden.
- When does the augmentation itself dominate our perception?
8.31 Tuesday
We were introduced to sensory experience design. As I was reading the Lupton Lipps’s book, The Senses, I found this map of scent in Singapore really interesting:
This map was created using experimental data generated by hundreds of local residents. The places were defined with the smells of curry, jasmine, and manila rope, which are all unique to the cultural background of each district.
I found “scent” to be an intriguing subject because it is usually regarded as the least noble sense in Modern society. Western culture and Modernism tended to favor hygiene and control over organic process, so many smells are intentionally removed from our daily experience. However, smell is still a very important part of our lives and it is entangled with our memory of a space.
My initial thought was to blend what is considered the noblest and least noble senses, which is vision and smell. As Juhani Pallasmaa argues in The Eyes of the Skin, the dominance of visual imagery and stimulation suppresses the advents of other senses. Because how the world we live in are visually dominated, taking away sight might increase our awareness of other senses.
Carrying on the scent map inspiration, I wanted to design a device that could help people navigate through space using smell instead of vision. However, since smell is systematically removed from our surroundings, and the fact that human don’t have the greatest smell sensitivity, it would be more practically to carry strong scent within the device.
The sketch model below has three tubes attached to the face mask, each of them supposed to have a ballon with different spice attached. The idea is that the wearer’s vision would be blocked by the mask, but whenever the ballon at the end of the tube bumped into something, the scented air will be blowed into the tube, all the way to the wear’s nose.
9.2 Thursday
In class, I received critiques about my initial ideas, and I listed the problems on my note below:
- Hard to execute
- Isolating from the environment
- Won’t work as intended: Touch will suggest the direction first before smell
9.3 Friday
I panicked a little after having my first idea rejected because I would only have 3 days left to start over again.
Although I was still obsessed with playing with smell, I decided to explore more combinations.
For the combination of touch and smell, I thought about having a foot pump that takes the smell of the grass to the wearer’s nose, but again, buying them online wouldn’t be realistic given the time frame I have. In the end, I decided to go with something more applicable and easy to execute with available materials.
I decided to go with the first combination with hearing and vision. The idea is that the wearer could change the color through which they sees the world. Originally, I was thinking about attaching bells at the bottom so that whenever the wearer switch color, he/she would hear a sound. However, this association does not make much sense to me, so I came up with another way of incorporating another sense: Attach fins on the side of the cylinder so that the headset would spin when the wind is strong enough. In other words, the sense of breeze on your skin will account for “touch”. I like this idea because the design encourages the wearers to go outdoor in search of wind.
As for the structure of the design, I need to make sure that I minimize the friction between the headset and the wearer’s head, but I’m not exactly sure how to achieve that except having the wearer put on a smooth plastic hat and some sort of oil around the contact area to reduce friction.
The first thing came up to my mind when thinking about color was filters, which are very commonly used on social media to augment our visions. It’s also interesting how we have so much control over how visual world looks like as oppose to the lack of control of vision in reality.
What’s interesting about filters is that by changing color/contrast level/ brightness/hue, we could also change the viewer’s mood and interpretation of an image.
I decided to look more into how color affects human psychology and more examples of color-based projects.
I also bought colorful transparent sheet. It’s interesting to see how overlapping them creates a darker/more saturated tone.
I chose blue, green, red, yellow for my color filters.
9.4 Saturday
After consulting my friend from Engineering, I realized that there is a better way to minimize the friction, which is having a pin with heavy head sitting on a convex surface. The rule I need to follow is to make sure the center of gravity is below the contact point and aligned on a vertical line.
I paid attention to the following three measurements:
- The distance between the top wire circle and the bottom wire circle: should not get too close to eyebrows or the structure will block the wearer’s vision.
- The distance between the eye and the filters: a comfortable range to adjust focus.
- The distance between the bottom of the filters and the shoulders: avoid colliding.
I spent most of my time getting the whole structure evenly weighted and symmetrical, which was harder than I thought, but eventually I got a functional model of the main structure.
Final Model:
Final Video:
