I’m thinking this will be half design, half engineering. I want the units to collectively have a sense of ‘aliveness’ to them, as if a portion of the fabric itself has become animated; this also helps with affordances/indicators when used as an interface!
At the same time, I want to hit certain targets for compactness (overall thickness), pixel density, actuation/update speed, how the array can be deformed/flexed, power consumption, fabrication consistency, and scalability up/down in size — which I’ll specify in time as I learn more about materials, electronics, mechanical systems, and fabrication processes.
The overall process:
- Design phase: Experiment with unit/pattern designs and how they might move, conduct background research on materials/applications, evaluate qualitatively and gather feedback, and ask around for advice about actuation / the necessary electronics
- Fabrication/development phase: Scale up from a finalized unit design and begin working towards the engineering criteria mentioned above, keeping the overall system integration in mind
- Weeks 5-8 (Electronic design to input devices): Design phase iterations, produce a few unit prototypes and simulated patterns
- Week 8 (Input devices): Prototype touch/pressure/force input that’s sewn into fabric
- Week 9 (Output devices): Prototype an actuation mechanism using one of the unit mockups, use that to determine what driving many units would require
- Week 10 (Wildcard week): Dedicated solely to this project — since I’ll likely be using less standard materials and fabrication processes (textiles, kirigami and folding, casted flexible polymers, etc)
- Week 11 (Networking and application programming): Work out networking / signal processing logistics, make an initial app for programming this display, fabrication progress + component/material orders
- Remainder of the semester, 12/4-12/15: Work on just this project, since I don’t have any final exams!
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