fashion risk Archives - Perfect 3D Printing Filament

If you don’t remember the stunning and technical work from Anouk Wipprecht—the Dutch fashion design working on “rethinking fashion in the age of digitalization” by combining engineering, fashion, robotics, science, and interaction/user experience in an emerging field known as FashionTech—let me refresh your memory. Noting that fashion lacks microcontrollers—something I never would have thought about—Wipprecht is an amazingly unique designer, who wants her clothing to, according to her website, “facilitate and augment the interactions we have with ourselves and our surroundings.”

“In a future where electronics are predicted to be embedded in everyday objects, – what kind of clothes will we wear? Will future techno fashion be purely aesthetic – or will it expand our awareness, acting like an intelligent second skin? Will we become super sensory, physically aware of data flows, communicating our internal states through the garments we wear? And, most pertinently perhaps, how will we socialize in our world when we are supervised by technology?”

Anouk Wipprecht’s Smoke Dress

Back in 2014, Wipprecht launched a campaign to create the first crowdsourced 3D-printed dress, and followed this up with her Synapse Dress, partnering with Materialise, Niccolo Casas, and Intel to create a wearable that leverages the wearer’s own electrical currents for a fully immersive experience. The designer later combined 3D printing with virtual reality to create a collection of dresses for Audi, and worked with model and musician Viktoria Modesta to fabricate 3D-printed prosthetics for musical performance.

Now, the high-tech futurist designer is back with two new 3D-printed wearables that could be very useful in this time of social distancing, due to the continuing COVID-19 crisis: the Proximity Dresses, Robotic Personal Space Defenders.

“Extending my research into proxemics and the body, I have fabricated two new dresses that create physical barriers when a person is detected in the immediate surroundings of the wearer,” Wipprecht said. “These twin dresses respond based on proximity and thermal sensors and indicates strangers within the intimate, personal, social and public space around the wearer.”

As with Wipprecht’s Smoke Dress and 3D-printed, robotic Spider Dress, which literally moves itself into an attack position if the embedded proximity biosensors detect that the wearer is uncomfortable, the design for these new dresses is based on Edward T. Hall’s Proxemics Theory. She explains that the theory defines “four spaces around the body,” each of which has its “own characteristic distances.”

Anouk Wipprecht’s 3D-Printed Spider Dress

“Whereas Hall had to measure the space between people using a wooden stick, I have been working since 2007 to translate these concepts into the digital domain, in order to measure the spaces between people up to a range of 25 feet,” she explained.

The Proximity Dresses use robotic, nylon 3D-printed hip mechanisms to extend when necessary. Additionally, they feature a transparent collar, 3D printed from clear resin, with some fancy sensors that offer noise-free distance readings.

Anouk Wipprecht’s Proximity Dress

These sensors use “high-output acoustic power combined with continuously variable gain, real-time background automatic calibration, real-time waveform signature analysis, and noise rejection algorithms. This holds true even in the presence of various acoustic or electrical noise sources, making it suitable for on-body use.”

By using the sensors, Wipprecht’s unique designs can invisibly trace their surroundings. Additionally, since the sensors don’t record any images or video, the dresses are not a threat to privacy, as nearby people remain anonymous.

“The Proximity Dress 2.0 is based on my 2012 prototype of this dress using hip mechanics create distance and a proximity sensor (ultrasonic rangefinder) for VW showcase during IAA, in Germany,” she concludes.

Check out the video below to see Wipprecht discuss her innovative, defensive Proximity Dress with Hyphen-Hub:

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The post Anouk Wipprecht’s 3D-Printed Proximity Dresses Are Perfect for Social Distancing appeared first on 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing.

We know that we are using far too many materials in a quest for consumption, could recycle them and could use these recycled goods in high valued materials but why use 3D printing? 3D printing is a series of technologies that are very good at making a unique shape in a day or two for far too high a cost per item. That means that if we consider volume businesses than 3D printing is currently too costly. Apart from machine time and cost as well as labor material cost is the biggest cost driver. Ideally, with recycled materials we would make low-cost materials that would enable more manufacturing. 3D printing’s sweet spot in terms of part size is still somewhere between a marble and a volleyball currently, however. So not for everything and not all the time. Intrinsicly, once you’ve invested in your mold and if you’re willing to wait for the boat to come back from China 3D printing is still a far lower throughput and higher cost technology than molding. But, if we want something now(ish) and we want it at a certain place 3D printing can give us an answer. Broadly, mass customization, fashion risk, and local production could all spark use cases in high-value consumer goods.

Local production is a hot topic due to renewed interest in nationalism and assuring one’s supply chain. If this is pertinent, rather than making something overseas local manufacturing could make significant dents in time to market. Being closer to your customer can have you respond on trend to the market quicker. A new style of fidget spinner could be in your customer’s hands before the other guy has ordered them from AliBaba. There is cause for pessimism here, however. In the fidget spinner trend, we as an industry made no inroads, and in fashion and luxury goods they often consider our parts ugly. On the extreme low end, our technology finds it difficult to leverage itself whereas on the high end we find it hard to impress. We could think of ourselves as a completely modular technology where one printer could make a 1000 hearing aid shells or dental molds per day. Theoretically, one could scale up and down manufacturing very easily and be much more versatile than other technologies. Yes, we save significant time and start-up costs over other manufacturing processes that require tooling. But, we have still to find a sweet spot where our intrinsic qualities can be appreciated.

Billie Eilish called, she wants her style back, Pull & Bear by Inditex

We can not compete with the least expensive things nor can we do battle head-on with the hand made. We can not compete against those things that are solely cost-driven and need to be made in their millions either. For the right 3D printed product to make sense, it needs to be a relatively small, high-value product that could benefit from our technology, immediacy and being made in relatively low volume on time. The sum total of these things point to a very exciting benefit that our technology has, and that is to be able to mitigate fashion risk. We do not have to plan 14 months ahead to see how many green slippers Danish people will buy. This means that huge errors in these numbers, either on the more optimistic and pessimistic side can be avoided. Yes, per item 3D printing will be more expensive but we won’t have to put 100,000 slippers in TJ MAXX or miss out on selling 200,000 orange slippers that you didn’t have in stock.

A Zara Capsule Collection

By combining up to date supply chain information from in stores with short completely controlled supply chains Inditex can already reorder parts in a number of days, redesign and deploy items in a matter of a days as well and go from an idea to a widely available in-store product in a week or two as well. We can already see that Zara’s parent company is widely successful because it mitigates fashion risk for itself. Its competitors are often still trying to estimate two years or 14 months in advance even today. To me the Zara model is sure to be the right one, but can 3D printing pull this off?

The post 3D Printing and Mass Customization, Hand in Glove Part V appeared first on 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing.