Project 3 : Summertime Memory
This time, we tackled a fashion design project that incorporates some basic technology using Arduino scripts. The idea that we pursued is based on my longing for home. Summertime Memory capture a moment in my past, that of a summer festival. A festival of vivid colors and fire works that lights up the night. In my langugage, the word for fire works is "flaming flower", which is what I used to draw my inspirations from. Once night falls and the temperature rises, signaling the beginning of the festival, the flowers on the shirts lights up in myriad of colors, simulating the fireworks.
Beginning our project, all we know for our task was to create a fashion item that have some technology integrated into it. It was pretty challenging, considering that my degree thus far did not trained me for this, moreover I have never done something similar to it before. My initial ideas were all a jumbled mess of random objects that do in fact light up. Once I have a better grasp on it however, by thinking about fashion as art and a platform to convey messages , I was able to come up with better Ideas. Below are the sketches of my ideas up to this point.
Having presented this in class, the one that seemed the most popular was the networking shirt, where each LED dot will represent a new person you connect with. But with the LED light strip that we had, we decided that it is probably too complicated to implement, if possible at all. The next idea we fell on as a group was the "the kimono" idea. We feel like there is a story that can be conveyed here, on top of it being more manageable in terms of practicalities and implementations. Below are some of our group refinement sketches that led up to this decision.
The creation process is quite interesting this time around. The first thing we need was of course, an "Asian looking shirt", so that we can portray the setting of the story we're trying to convey: a firework festival. Which just so happen that I have a random festival shirt lying around in my closet for no reason whatsoever, so I figured it would be a good time to finally put it to use.
Working together, with our expertise in weaving and electrical engineering, we are able to achieve a satisfiable result. Our intricacies in the creation of this artwork involved a considerable of clear plastic tape, duct tape, and a lot of unpaid com sci undergrad labor.
And that's about it for this time! If you ask any of us what we did, well, I'd like to believe our answer to uniformly be "we did a lot of taping". As per my contributions, the original idea and the refinements that ended up being implement, I would say that I can claim as my own. I did not contribute much to coding this time around, but I was able to help ease the process being the one most experienced with arduino from our last project. I however, did most of the wiring on the board and placements of the LED lights.
And of course, here's a video to show off what we did!
The Team
Neil Chulpongsatorn
Tyler Cooper
Franchesca Purifacion
Jordan Lee