«Captain Electric» is
a collection of three electronic garments that both passively harness energy from the body and actively allow for power generation by the user. Reflecting fashion’s historic relationship between discomfort and style, the dresses restrict and reshape the body in order to produce sufficient energy to fuel themselves and actuate light and sound events on the body.
a collection of three electronic garments that both passively harness energy from the body and actively allow for power generation by the user. Reflecting fashion’s historic relationship between discomfort and style, the dresses restrict and reshape the body in order to produce sufficient energy to fuel themselves and actuate light and sound events on the body.
Itchy, Sticky, and Stiff conceptually reference safety apparel and personal protection as well as our fears of natural disasters and other states of emergency, personal phobias, anxieties, and paranoia.
Using inductive generators, we convert kinetic energy from the human body into electric energy and store it within a power cell integrated into the garments. Rather than attempting to conceal the generators and their operation, we chose to overtly integrate them into the garment concept and design.
Itchy, Sticky, and Stiff (the Captain Electric collection) is the culmination of the «Captain Electric and Battery Boy» research project initiated in 2007 to explore the design possibilities for wearable human-generated power.
Other components of this research include a series of concept illustrations, a selection of student projects from a design course, and a set of prototypes that emerged from a two-week thematic workshop held in the summer of 2008.
