Functional Underwear

Roman reviewed our progress on Tuesday and once more individually showed us how we could improve our early prototypes. We looked at further possibilities inside Cura and experimented. The settings, for example, enable us to create special surfaces like the so-called Fuzzy Skin. The nozzle is not moved in a straight line, but rather in a shaky movement along the initial line of the model. Layer by layer, this creates a rough surface.

Other settings included printing hollow models with only one line of the filament. This enables us to spare lots of printing time, as the nozzle only needs to pass one line and does not need to jump around between positions. The only disadvantage is, that we would need to optimize the whole model for this kind of printing method, as it requires single line layers.

Later in the morning, Roman helped us with the Formlabs printer. Our idea was to experiment with the flexible resin, to create a structure which we could put on a manakins elbow or knee joint. Using this sort of blockage in such a small scale, we could determine how and where limitations would be most efficient.

Wearable experiments

Later in the afternoon, we sewed some of our 3D prints onto different fabrics. At first, we used quite stiff, thick fabric. This obviously did not really work the way we wanted it to, due to the high resistance of the material. We then went more into the direction of a jersey fabric. This textile would easily fit onto the body because of its ductility.

After the mentoring sessions on Wednesday, we were quite uncertain about the further process. We had to admit that our concept had shifted. Somewhere along the path, we had lost our initial focus.

We then decided to take a step back and rethink our whole path. We somehow realized that our goals became too complex and included way too many aspects and critiques. After we seemingly chatted for hours, we defined our new but also kind of old core sentence that will define our end goal:

Tackle the problematic with Social Credit Systems (eg. China) that are emerging, by transforming the invisible into a physical limitation of the body.

Now

We precisely defined the current state of our process in order to present it on Thursday's mid presentations. By transforming these almost imperceptible limitations, that a Social Credit System can construct, into limitations of the body, we hope to make the users or test persons more aware of the issue. Even if the System's boundaries were very small, ethnically seen it is still very wrong to punish people on their behavior in public. It is in my opinion even worse to do so if the viewed person does not even know they are being watched.

Another thing that we defined is the positive outcome. For now, it seems that there is no benefit for people who do good in this system. The best you can do is not being limited. We settled on this because of the normal concept of Social Credit Systems, hey do not offer any other benefit to good people, maybe small financial benefits, but no real reward.

 Next Up

Our next aim is to find a structure that works in the term of bodily limitation. Ideally, we find a principle, which we could adapt, using some sort of motor or controller. This would enable us to gradually change the intensity of the limitation. But we have not succeeded in that matter so far. I'm sure we'll find a way.