My Heart on My Dress

Individual Project Spring 2016

Tags: Wearables, Textiles, IoT, Data Personalization

Toolkits: Screen Printing, Soft Circuitry, PCB, Bluetooth LE, Alchemy API, Node.js, phoneGap

My Heart on My Dress is a bespoke connected garment that visualizes my daily experiences and emotions through dynamic changing colors and patterns. Real-time text analysis of my digital diary influences the design of the dress.

Garments are diaries – different dresses say different things, some garments connect us to specific memories, we personalize our clothing the same way we personalize the pages of our journals.

My Heart on My Dress is a novel expression of these themes. It explores personal expression and a narrative version of quantified self through a combination of traditional textiles with innovative technologies.

The custom-made dress is screen printed with thermochromatic ink and wired with soft circuits and thermal patches. Its patterns and colors transform based on data analyzed from a personal diary app.

Ideation

Garments for me is also a way of self expression, different colors and patterns on dresses say different things, some garments connect us to specific memories, we personalize our clothing every single day based on our daily activities. I want to create an interactive and dynamic garment to express ourselves and affect out social lives.

I’ve been keeping a diary for a long time. I love writing, drawing on my journal book. Different colors and patterns are related to different emotions, content and people in my diary. And I love this crafting experience to memorize my life. I always want to explore more about personalized expression.

One of my previous project is a digital diary that visualizes my diary content into patterns and shapes on a website. For each of the diary entry, the solid color represents the subject category, the stripe color represents emotions. I found it’s an interesting way to visualize my diary but obscuring the details, However, it still has very digital effects, and I want to explore the expression in a more analog, none tech looking ways.

Based on this idea, I want to make a garment that changes it’s own colors and patterns through out the day according my diary input. And then affect my daily interaction with other people.

System Design

The custom-handmade dress has colors and patterns that can change by a controlled circuit. Based on data analyzed frommy personal diary app, the circuit make the dress change patterns dynamically.

Every time I input into my diary app, I tag the content and then save them to the database. On the database, the content get analyzed. These results get sent back to the dress wirelessly through bluetooth low energy, which affects the pattern change on the dress.