Urbanhermes : fashion signaling and the social mobility of images

Abstract

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.