Iris
What if clothes were a platform?
Today, one of the most polluting industries is fashion, with tons of mass production, and a market inducted by outraged consumption and fast tendencies that go away in a month. One of the possible solutions involves developing new sustainable materials that mimic things we already know for years in a sustainable way, like leather made with mycelium. But looking through the future, we are not evolving the concept of fashion products, we are still sustaining the idea of creating a piece of clothing with different parts and materials, recycling ideas, and continuing with a fast capitalist business model on trends that last one month.
Fashion means communication through the body, it expresses who we are, our values and beliefs, and how we project ourselves with the culture around us and show how everything together impacts our social life, our environment, and the community around us. But what if we could improve the concept of fashion products to change and adapt their physical properties to what we want to communicate anytime and anywhere?
To prevent the possibility of the device changing colors with the body of the person who’s wearing or with the environment around, the pieces that compose the mash, are produced using a Cyclicolefin copolymer which presents interesting properties compared to commonly employed thermoplastics that have been used for quite a time now such as PC and PMMA.
The second part of the technology relies on a structure that will arrange the pieces into a single part made of the same materials as the microfluidic devices with electrical-induced materials printed to transfer electricity and activate the heat sensor to start the color change process and activate the points located in areas between each device to change its form. The hexagon of the microfluidics with the skeleton which gives the structure to the mash, is based on one of the most ancient 3D interpretations in digital modeling, polygons, giving the possibility to the mesh fold in and out.
Technological anatomy
The Iris technology can be named an MRDM (microfluidic responsive display mash), a collection of devices united as a textile capable of changing shape and color, two of the most important physical aspects of styling in a piece of clothing. The technology is composed of three important parts, a microfluidic display embodied with genetically engineered E.Coli bacteria that can change color according to the temperature emitted on them, with three possible responses, red, yellow, and blue, the primary physical colors.
Human interaction
To interact and change the properties of the mash, users will have to connect the wearable to an interface, a place where they can manipulate information into the physical properties that would like to change to communicate their intentions through the platform, the cloth itself. The link between the mash through the interface relies on the connection made by the third part of the dispositive, the brain, a place where the information is exchanged between the devices and distributed through by the electrical printed conductors on the first layer.
