Lumen is an immersive interactive installation created by Jenny Sabin Studio. It was exhibited at MoMA PS1 as the winner of the Young Architects Program in 2017. The digitally knitted structure uses responsive textile that can emit glowing color at night by absorbing sunlight throughout the day. The installation was created with the concept of being “socially and environmentally responsive”, and aimed for a collective immersive experience for the visitors.
I think this piece has great potential of implementing soft technology. Starting with the why questions, since the installation has already experimented with solar active fiber, to explore interactivity with soft sensors would be suitable as well. Also, the YAP installations are used as settings for the PS1 Warm Up music performances. Connecting knitted or woven sensors with collaborative music creation could be a possible application for soft technology.
Possible technology:
Rebecca Stewart and Sophie Skach. 2017. Initial Investigations into Characterizing DIY E-Textile Stretch Sensors. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Movement Computing (MOCO ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 1, 1–4. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3077981.3078043
Paper: Ruojia Sun, Ryosuke Onose, Margaret Dunne, Andrea Ling, Amanda Denham, and Hsin-Liu (Cindy) Kao. 2020. Weaving a Second Skin: Exploring Opportunities for Crafting On-Skin Interfaces Through Weaving. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 365–377. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395548