Awakened Apparel
Soft, integrated actuators for expressive shape-changing clothing
How might our clothing adapt to situations by transforming its shape?
Awakened Apparel is a shape-changing skirt that uses novel material technology to integrate soft actuators into clothing that can transform its functionality and emotional expression.
Embedding expressivity into material
Fashion is a means of self-expression and an interface with the external world; it can serve as a functional barrier to the elements, but also as an aesthetic expression of our identity and behaviour. Yet our clothing is somewhat static; any modification we make through unzipping our sweatshirts or rolling up our sleeves are manual and performed by ourselves.
Awakened Apparel is a skirt inspired by the dynamic shape-changing transformations of origami, using laminated inflation channels embedded into the very fabric of the skirt to create a more softly actuated emotional shape change.
Sketch of the shape-changing skirt in many forms
Inflated detail of final skirt
Experiments in different origami folds and inflation techniques led to the development of a new soft pneumatic material that used heat-sealed layers of anti-static film, paper and fabric fusing material to create inflation channels directly embedded into the skirt. Cutting these channels into a modified Miura fold and fusing them alternately on the top and underside of the skirt enabled the skirt to fold when inflated, allowing the form to shift to the emotion and functions desired by the wearer.
Final skirt prototype - deflated and inflated
Early curving origami experiment
Early designs for integrating a Miura origami fold into a skirt panel
Layered pneumatic actuation mechanism
Actuation layers being fused to the fabric of the skirt
Final skirt prototype - deflated and inflated
Final design for skirt inflation folding pattern - red channels are affixed to the underside of the fabric, blue to the topside
Final design for fabrication of heat-sealed inflation channel layers
Publication
Awakened apparel: embedded soft actuators for expressive fashion and functional garments | 2014
Laura Perovich, Philippa Mothersill, & Jennifer Brutin Farah. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction.