Emotional Artifacts for Fashion - boosting personal relations to garments

Abstract: I have in this project studied the area of personalized design as a way to create stronger bounds between artifacts and user. The way we relate to what we surround us with is important when we want to expose our personalities and tell who we really are. Today, in a world of mass-production, design and production seldom occurs at the same place. It feels like we are gliding away from the way we were connected to our things in the past. When we needed new cupboards for the kitchen, we went to the local carpenter and let him design and produce what we needed. The clothes were brought from travelling vendors, produced in the village or made by someone in your family, often with self-made yarn from the family farm’s sheep. We often had a connection to what we owned in another way than today. People knew exactly where their possessions came from, what material had been used and where that material had grown.I have within this project investigated how to create that personal connection to an artifact and adapt it to the contemporary. To achieve this I have looked into the different kinds of invisible information that our bodies contain. Information that is produced by numerous processes all the time, which we may not think about. I’ve been studying how people react when their inner processes are visualized through usage tests, exhibitions and finally interviews. The result is a concept I call Emotional Artifacts. The concept is describing how the idea of personalized fashion can be realized. A prototype has been built to show some of the possibilities with this kind of design that, with certain rules and ground sets, is generated by the user and later applied to different media.