playground behaviour

RE:fashion Oxford Street - playground

Disruption and discord
Give Oxford Street back its anarchic origins
Introduce a machine which disrupts this orderly flow
Allow for the manufacture of discordant fashion
Discord out of order
Variety from homogeneity

A machine to re-manufacture fashion
RE:invigorate consumer imagination
RE:constitute purchasing power
RE:empower the individual

Your fashion
Your choice

The site

Between John Lewis and House of Fraser
Two behemoths of homogeneous culture

Large
Corporate
Efficient
Impersonal
Consumption
The idea

To intervene between them with a playground for fashion creation

Small
Intimate
Anarchic
Personal
Creation
A playground in which the consumer/creator participates in the creation of their own fashion using their body as the design tool



RE:fashion

RE:fashion Oxford Street

Oxford Street
Rampant consumerism incarnate
Its only function: the purchase and consumption of goods and the efficient circulation of people to that effect
Orderly consumerism producing a homogenised and sterile culture

NetLogo workshop

NetLogo is an agent based behavioural programming language that can be used to study crowd behaviours by applying simple universal rules to each individual.

This concept was then applied to a real life exercise in Seville.

Weaving in reality

But can the behaviours found in the plants be incorporated into a machine, using weaving techniques, aspect of which were explored in the Grasshopper workshops?

Initially some material studies were performed. From these the material chosen was 1.5mm plywood.

The logic chosen for the weave pattern came from the phyllotaxic growth pattern exhibited by the sun-flower. By connecting each of the 13 outer points to the six closest inner points we created a pattern that was used for the weave.


In order to have the machine react to its environment it became necessary to have more than one weave layer. This allows for differences in behaviour of each weave to create an overall macine behaviour. The distances between the layers of weave was determined by a gradient field developmed by one of the team members during the cress seed testing and related to the nutient density used for the cress.

Weaving in Grasshopper

An exploration of the Grasshopper plugin for Rhino using a weave pattern as an example.

The initial weave gives a 3 over 1 under weave pattern which is shown in the warp/weft of 8/10 in the centre column of these images. As a start for the exploration of Grasshopper I created a catalogue showing the different results obtained when either the warp or the weft was changed with the other remaining static. While this produced some interesting results they were not in themselves explanations for what was happening.

To further understand how Grasshopper was creating the weave pattern I took a more considered approach and developed these two explanations. In effect the weave pattern is created through the relationship between the number of 'V' rows of points that you have, the shift value that you use and the culling patterns applied to the resulting weave mesh. In short the shift operation will create the initial weave mesh and determine the angle that the warp and weft threads have within the weave while the cull operation is used to remove all of the warp and weft threads that touch. The end result should be a weave in which no war or weft lines actually meet.

Tropisms

The manner in which plants react to their surroundings is known as tropism. There are a number of different tropisms associated with certain plant types and the stimulus required varies greatly.

Observations of cress seed growth toward light source. This form of tropism is known as phototropism and occurs in all plants.

Observations of thigmotropism (reaction to touch). This tropism is mainly found in climbing plants. Although all plants have a thigmotropic reaction in their root systems this used to avoid objects while growing rather than to grow around objects as with climbing plants.



Cybernetic diagram for thigmotropism.