First explored shape actuation — however, the insides were not all glued together properly. We placed a deck of cards on top to ensure that it was going to stick but someone removed the deck and so the insides were all not connected and did not make the shapes we wanted. Instead, it just had a big protrusion.
For the second model, the mold was warped so that the silicone kept ripping. Talked to Cody and he said it was the printers problem.
In the third model, we tested a bigger version that had more liquid and had color!
From this experiment, we learned that it is possible to have a self-contained shape changing simply by pumping a lot of liquid and air. We also learned it is best to inject from the top of a repository, and it is best to pump darker color liquid into a syringe, since it will get much lighter in small quantities
Our current Idea
We are going to be creating a 2-piece sports wearable that signals to the audience and the wearer when a potential injury has occurred. One piece will be a head gear and one piece will be a knee gear. There will be a performance element in that the ‘players’ will be demonstrating the changes in the wearable (i.e. color, direction of liquid flow, and shape change) through normal sports interactions, and then demonstrate the ‘injury’ through pantomiming (i.e. landing lighter on the knee but still full impact). Affected areas will be shown with reversible color and shape change, and a locking mechanism will be implemented to keep the liquid in certain areas until it is manually reset.
Feedback from Garth on 03/16
- How is the audience interacting w it? Is the transformation something that just the audience observes, or does the wearer observe
- Which body part are we concentrating on
- Theme? Contact sport, Domestic Violence, is the audience doing the pressing of the “pulser” or is the user?
- Are we sticking to just microfluidics for both shape and color transformation? If so, we need to plan to pump water into the shape molds for the experiments
Potential Ideas
- Knee Injury + Head injury
- Performance where 2 players are practicing a sport (i.e. soccer) and one person feigns an injury (i.e. landing slowly on their knee so as to not hurt themselves, but to imitate the level of impact)
- Locking mechanism to keep liquid in certain areas, so when the injury is ‘revealed’ (i.e. knee comes up after being slammed down, the liquid is in a different location), the audience can see what happened
- Reversible color change (i.e. overlapping of colors that can be undone)
- Need to map out an idea for the channel design of each of these wearables (Jina does head, Sunjana does knee)
- Experiment with shape change of existing silicone molds/amount of liquid going in
- Experiment with color change
- Need to choreograph the performance
Schedule
03/14: Molds are printed
03/18: Make molds and test
End of the week 03/20: Make weekly post and one more iterations
- Sunjana will test patterns for the liquid color
- Jina will start to think about the design and test the shape changing
- Both will test layering that will combine shape and liquid injection
03/21: Design new molds + Brainstorm the range of movements/effects for each movement
- Jina focuses on using the amount of liquid to make shape change
- Sunjana focuses on enabling a reversible color change that is more apparent (i.e. you can see the different colors as well as how they briefly overlap into one), and will also figure out how to best inject the liquid such that it doesn’t leak out of the holes
03/25: Make Molds and test:
End of the week 03/27: Make weekly post and more iterations
03/28: Final mold test
04/01: Make molds and test
End of the week 04/03: Make weekly posts and start to make the final design