Bionic Bubble
DESIGN CONCEPT
How does your wearable recontextualize you from perceived urban stresses in crowded, open spaces?
BIONIC BUBBLE is a generated skin, functioning as a living body that represents the boundary surrounding an individual. This wearable translates information into matter by deforming and transforming material. By augmenting the perception of bodily limits, the project aims to create responsive and action-oriented membranes for dynamically generated bodies.
Many people struggle with anxiety in social contexts, feeling significant distress when their personal boundaries are invaded in crowded spaces. People with this fear choose avoidance behaviour in order to be away from the distress that public engagement.
In an attempt to change this cognitive distortion and improve emotional regulation of one, situated in a stressful crowded space, BIONIC BUBBLE proposes a coping strategy that is achieved through material adaptation. By infalting air into the wearable, physical boundaries of human transforms and expands, creating more personal space for the human, as the subject of experience.
DESIGN PROCESS
By integrating electronics, this project enables information exchange between material bodies. This exchange allows the materiality of the bounded body to become both performative and transformative. Integrating proximity sensors and motion sensors in the material of this wearable, data coming from the surrounded environment becomes the active and generative factor in physical emergence/deformation of the border, which in return influence the human’s sense of self and security in relation to other people and other physical settings which define and structure day to day life.
BIONIC BUBBLE serves as a prosthesis for the mind, designed to protect the body, create personal space, and enhance the subject's awareness of its context. Additionally, the human experience in space becomes a generative agent for producing new experiences as bodies and environments co-shape each other.
FABRICATION PROCESS
