Augmenting Senses
Fall Studio 2020 — Augmented Body
Initial Explorations of Senses + Related Wearables/Tech and their Purposes:
^Circled Concepts, Senses, and Purposes were places I thought would make good design opportunities for augmentation.
Quick Thumbnail sketches while brainstorming and researching references:
3 Primary Concepts from brainstorm (Sketches):
Feedback from Daphne (Sept 3rd):
“How do you do something unexpected with the senses?” — Play on people’s assumptions and years of experience with touching (sensing) a certain type of thing. Ex: Pen with a fuzzy outer texture plays on years of experience of smooth feeling pens.
“Doesn’t need to be dramatic just unexpected, makes people think and re-notice parts of their everyday routine/environment”
Assumptions about sensory experience of an environment based on lifetime build up of past experiences, play on those assumptions to create an entirely new, unexpected experience by mixing senses
→ Experience similar to sitting in my room working and having the smell of food being cooked by neighbor drift into the apartment unexpected
→ Makes me feel happy and hungry in a work environment where I normally don’t feel that because of the (expected) sensory environment (very little significant, rich smells, visuals, or other sensory)
Primary Feedback Point: Explore a way to manipulate multiple senses at once in relation to the expectations of the environment. (Example given: smelling Tumeric in the forest and how this becomes an unexpected sensory experience w/the environment, how can this be added onto by combining levels of sensory input with one another within the wearable?)
Combine aspects of Goggles concept (manipulating vision expectations) with aspects of Mask concept (manipulating smell expectations)
References (Goggles + Mask Forms):
Form Explorations and Physical Prototypes for Goggle and Mask forms:
→ Sketches while trying to figure out form for Mask.
Final Concept:
Subvert built-up sensory expectations for a forest environment, by altering vision and smell senses with the mask but leaving sound and touch intact. This could create a novel, alternative sensory experience to the assumed forest experience. Smell was altered with a spice canister within the mask (in this case Chili Powder) and Vision altered through a blurred, harsh white Velum paper in the goggles.
Final Form:
