Urbanhermes : fashion signaling and the social mobility of images

Urbanhermes is a messenger bag designed to display and disseminate meaningful yet ephemeral images between people in the public realm. These images surface as representation of the daily zeitgeist; the image as fashion emerges and grows in popularity as knowledge diffuses over a very short period of time. A wireless communication infrastructure allows users to pass along images from bag to bag, and potential proximity sensing adds awareness of others nearby who share a similar fashion signal. Dynamically formed communities interplay and merge through the coupled system of shared images. Urbanhermes, through adding layers of highly temporal information upon an individual's public identity, attempts to enrich social interaction and understand the cultural role of electronic fashion. The thesis, combining both social theory and technology, develops a fashion system that can enable further discussion in areas of signaling in sociable media design. We hypothesize that electronic fashion signals in the physical realm will allow people to disclose and perceive expressive qualities about themselves that would not be possible by current material fashions. This project presents a design framework and a proof-of-concept study in which this hypothesis may be examined.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Christine M. (Christine Mae)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Judith S. Donath.

• Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37393

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37393