Faded: slow sensation

Supervisor：Nicolai Marquardt
Photo : KJ Zhan, Jiacheng He

Crafted in London and Ningbo, April, 2020

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This project is inspired by ‘Faded‘ from Jackson Wang

Concept —

Thermochromic materials have been widely applied in artistic and scientific projects in wearable and tangible forms, however, its application in affective computing fields are rarely seen. I truly believe there is a metaphor among the nature of thermochromic paints, emotions and other phenomena. It takes no more than seconds to trigger the colour change conditions but consumes rather minutes to evanish the variation. The characteristics is comparable to human emotions, the spontaneous burst of intense sensation may induce by occasional mood swings, however, its influence on our affective state can last long. Intense but unpredictable, versatile but stable.

Inspiration —

Faded is a novel physical installation that explores the human emotion and cognitive states by affective computing methods. It visualizes your transient emotions into an abstract emoji pattern, by this approach it expresses my ideation on ‘inwards to outwards’ concepts in a narrative way. The project visions to improve the self-awareness of affective state in a non-intrusive and indirect manner.

This project was Inspired by one of my favorite desinger & artist Jingwen’s work ‘My heart on my dress’ and prior research in affective computing from MIT medialab and UCLIC.

Material — 

The thermochromic material is based namely two categories, in pigment and liquid ink. They have different application scenarios and methods. Restricted by the medium properties, chromic ink was used in my case by brush printing onto the mounted fabrics. By mixing the ink with binders with the proportions of 2:1, it perfectly infused into the cotton materials. The colour saturation could be adjusted by adjusting the percentage of binders in the blend.

The orange to neon yellow colour change is stimulated when the temperature reaches 28.3 Celsius, that means a decent heating source would be sufficient to induce such effect, for example, the human body.

The restrictions and difficulties implied to this project were how to heat up only the desired shape. To do this, I experimented with two methods, using heat conductive materials to transduce thermal energy from heat pads to the patterns and the other is to use resistors as heating elements. Based on the results, the resistance wire expressed was selected because of its outstanding performance on heating up the pattern uniformly and simultaneously.

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Below are some of the parameteres I have experiemented with:
room temerature: 25 Celsius
risistor: approximately 15-18 ohm/m (I used 60ohm/m resisitor wire in parallel of four)
time for colour change: 3 -5 seconds
voltage: 3.3V
material applied: canvas

Fabrication —

Emotion Recongtion —

The platform I used is google teachbale machine for emotional dectection. An alterantive tools I recommand is emotion detection package via Raspberry Pi.

I also write down a brief introduction session of how to send data from p5 to arduino by wire, please refer to ‘arduino-advacne serial communication’ for more information.

Exhibition —

For me, ‘faded’ in some extent reflected and recorded my past experience in spring time in 2020. I was lost, faded, struggled from being rejected for CHI, job hunting and destorying my personal relationships. Its soft of a gift for myself to those torments, though those dumb things revolves around me periodicly, I am more brave to say I am ready to restart now.