Our course, “DEA 6040 Future Body Craft: Fabricating On-Skin Interfaces” is featured in the Cornell Chronicle. Congrats to the students who were featured — Jeyeon Jo from FSAD, and our very own Heather Kim from DEA.
Jeyeon Jo, doctoral student in apparel design, works on his wearable tech design during a virtual lab for Future Body Craft. (Lindsay France/Cornell University)
Cornell Chronicle (10/21/2020) “Silver linings: Innovation, kits, tech animate a hybrid semester,” https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/10/silver-linings-innovation-kits-tech-animate-hybrid-semester
‘You always put in an arm’
For some instructors, the challenges of social distancing dovetailed with their research and teaching goals. Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, assistant professor of design and environmental analysis in the College of Human Ecology, aims to use common materials to design wearable tech and smart tattoos – adhesives that are glued to the skin and send signals to devices.
Preparing at-home kits for graduate students in her new class, Future Body Craft, offered the perfect opportunity to do just that.
“My lab is really interested in using everyday materials, and practices that are highly inspired by craft and adapted in an interesting way, so people can actually do this from their homes,” Kao said. “That’s what’s enabling us to run this course. It’s impossible to let students access clean rooms, but because these items are made from pretty accessible tools and materials, we were able to build this kit and ship it to them.”
The kit includes more than 30 items for prototyping, including gold leaf, temporary tattoo paper, embroidery stabilizer, copper wire, conductive thread and tape, several types of batteries, LEDs, small microcontrollers and a mannequin arm.
“You always put in an arm,” Kao said. “For students to prototype they need the mannequin arm to put the tattoo on, see how it works.”
For one of the exercises, the students create an LED tattoo using conductive fabric tape.
The first half of the course included labs via Zoom, where the students used their kits for a series of exercises, such as creating an LED tattoo using conductive fabric tape. In the second half, they’ll design and build their own prototypes.
“For students to be able to actually make these interfaces, integrate the technology and really understand how it works, they need to be able to practice building them,” Kao said. “What’s really important is the materiality.”
For one of the exercises, DEA doctoral student Heather Kim creates an LED tattoo using conductive fabric tape. (Lindsay France/Cornell University)