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Women Safety (NL)

Team

Akarsh Sanghi

Interaction Designer, Developer


Laura Mul

Researcher


Shinichiro Ito

Creative Technologist, Media Producer


Commissioner:

Description

Ifabrica lasercutting: first print of necklace

3D printing

The necklace doesn’t only have to work correctly, but women must also be willing to wear it. First of all, the design was expected to be based on 3d printing as this would be an innovative approach and it would be relatively easy to put our technical parts in the necklace. Although this sounded nice in the beginning, we changed our minds after having talked with a 3D designer who thought that our instant focus on 3d printing was not obvious. Why not try other materials?

Felt

felt

 

Felt was the next idea as it is easy to use and it feels nice on the skin. Also, it can be very spatial which makes it easy for the technical parts to fit in. As can be read in one of our previous blogposts, we made one case for one of the electronic part that has to fit in the necklace. It would be great to combine the 3D printing to make cases and then put felt around it.

 

 Lasercutting

In order to cut the felt, the lasercutter at Ifabrica would be perfect to use. This is why I went to attend the lasercutting workshop.  The evening started with a nice soup where the workshops participants were introduced to each other. The lasercutting workshop was attended by one lamp designer and one woman who wanted to make an interactive aquarium. First a presentation about lasercutting was given followed by the actual 3D printing. We were to test the different amount of speeds and power on a small piece of wood. This could tell us what kind of settings should be used when you want to cut through wood or when you just want to engrave it. After this, I started working with the felt. The workshop teacher already did some felt experiments, so I could use some of her knowledge to estimate the power and speed of the laser. I imported the file of the necklace and hoped that I made it the right size, so it would be wearable. It seemed that that right speed and power were chosen, so I immediately cut the whole necklace. After this, I tried the thinner felt, but this wasn’t fantastic, since the felt was too thin which made it very vulnerable. The actual speed I used for the thicker red felt was 20 and the power was 80. This means that it went quite slowly with a high power.

Time passed quickly: I was still busy lasercutting when we had to stop as it was 9 o’clock. Therefore I only printed two of the same patterns. Hopefully we can come back to print some more.

Design

The design is still a little problem. I talked to the workshop teacher and she found that felt is to be worn by old ladies. I obviously didn’t like this, but this is true as felt can easily become corny. That is why we have a challenge to make it attractive for all ages. The workshop teacher gave me a better felt shop which is called vilta.

Since there are no designers in our team, we are looking for one. In a few days, we will meet Birgit Daams, who is very enthusiastic about our project and makes felt  which are spatial. She might work together with us, but this will be found out during the meeting. Next to that, there are some AMFI (Amsterdam Fashion Institute) students that are willing to work with us.

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