FASHION VICTIMS

Fashion Victims
is a project by:

Agnelli Davide
Buzzini Dario
Drori Tal


News:

Fashion Vistims is featured in the book
“Fashioning the future” Suzanne Lee, Ed. Thames & Hudson

(News Archive)



copyright 2003-4, FV + IDII

Hertzian Space Starting point for Fashion Victims is the investigation of the invisible world behind mobile communication, referring particularly to the space Fiona Raby and Tony Dunne define as Hertzian Space.

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2001) Design Noir: the Secret Life of Electronic Objects. Birkhauser – Publishers for Architecture.

Making the Invisible Visible In Fashion Victims we chose clothing as the medium for making this invisible world visible: we have designed a collection of garments that react (respond and change) according to the surrounding mobile phone calls.

Social Consequences of Mobile Communication Despite the social consequences of mobile phone usage are vast and complex, the act of making phone calls constitutes such an intrinsic part of our lives that is getting more and more invisible. Phone calls, in the basic physical form of radiations and electricity, often surround us. We want to see what would happen if our clothes — everyday objects that we carry on our person — were able to display this presence

Clothing Apparel is the design medium we have chosen to "illustrate" some of the social consequences of mobile communication. The choice of this medium has to do with the already existing language and codes of apparel, that we use in order to communicate, self-express and position ourselves.

Raising awareness Fahion Victims is a critical design project. Fashion Victims subverts the expected behaviour of an everyday object to create and raise awareness about the subject of mobile communication. 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?

Metaphor The metaphor we have decided to use for visualizing mobile communication comes directly from nature: clothes, as a second skin, react to the environment and change in color. Skin is the mirror of our health status displaying whether we feel good or bad. Skin alteration can be as physical as psychological: shame or embarrassment can make the skin blush, a knife can make it bleed. Here, as more and more phone calls are conducted in their surroundings, the clothes progressively and permanently change color.

Form exploration Driven by our desire of creating a visual language and not to measure and display information, we avoided on purpose digital and reversible form of display in favor of a more qualitative representation. We have chosen to design a permanent behavior rather than a temporary alarm. We want to show mobile communications through a unique, organic, analogical pattern. We knit technology inside the fabric, keeping in mind feasibility, simplicity and creativity.

The First Prototypes In our first design exploration we came up with three prototypes: a shirt, a bag and a hat. We chose simple basic cuts and materials in order to avoid drawing the attention away from the actual interaction and the process of reaction and mutation.

The t-shirt While embedding the channels we took under consideration the structure of each garment. The elements we needed as part of our exploration (the sensor, the channel), were considered part of the design itself: instead of hiding them, we integrated them in the garments. In particular, the brain of the garment (the electronics needed to sense the surrounding mobile phone calls) is embedded in the label, a very recognizable detail of the collection.

The bag As a second step we chose to develop the bag to a stage of a working prototype. Although using ink, we made sure that the bag, its mechanism and its reaction to mobile communication will not contradict the garment’s initial function – being a bag.

A Movie: the bag in action (2.4 Mb)

Crafting the interaction The interaction was designed as such that will serve the bag and its user both as functional and fashionable item. The user has control over the interaction simply by being able to turn it on or off. Once the bag has reached a point when the user doesn’t want it to be stained anymore, the mechanism can be pulled out; and the bag can be used a regular one.

In the picture: Bags stained during the exhibition E-culture Fair 2 in Amsterdam, October 2003.

Design as Research From a design perspective this project has been thought in the context of design as research: focus of the project is producing tools potentially helpful in performing a research in the context of mobile phone communication. As soon as the garment we decided to design (a bag, specifically, is our first working prototype) exists and works, it’s time to give it to real people in the real world. So this bag becomes an exploratory tool for understanding and mapping behaviors and attitudes in the context of mobile phone usage.

A paper: Fashion Victims: an Unconventional Research Approach in the Field of Mobile Communication (.pdf, 620Kb). Presented at ISMID '04, Istanbul (Turkey), January 2004.

Fashion Victims is featured in Pronto? Where are you? a research conducted by Davide Agnelli and Tal Drori at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, between Autumn 2003 and Spring 2004.

Credits Fashion Victims has been conceived and developed at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, since Spring 2003, by:
Agnelli Davide
Buzzini Dario
Drori Tal

Thanks to:
Camille Norment, Cait Reas, Casey Reas, Massimo Banzi, Barbara Busatta, Edoardo Brambilla, Yaniv Steiner and the whole IDII community.