In 1963, an anthropologist called Edward T. Hall
realised there was no term for the study of personal space,
so he invented one.
Because that's the sort of thing that anthropologists like to do.
He called it ‘proxemics’, and it caught on,
because it turned out to be a good way to let people think about abstract questions
like:
how do you react when someone gets too close, too fast?
What we have here is a robotic spider dress.
So it’s a dress that has mechanical limbs that are reacting.
It is reacting on you coming closer, so you coming near.
There are two proximity sensors here.
They are in the balls of the design.
They are sensing when you come too close.
There are 12 states that are pre-programmed.
Basically, it’s deciding between 1 of those 12 states
in order to create one of these animations.
In his book, Hall proposes four distance zones:
the public, the social, the personal and the intimate.
Now, in the sort of life coaching seminars that people get sent to,
and in middle management textbooks,
those zones are treated as gospel,
as 'this is how everyone behaves'.
But in Hall’s own words, the zones were only a first approximation.
They were based on a tiny sample of university educated Americans.
They weren’t representative of human behaviour in general,
and they weren’t meant to be.
They were crude stereotypes.
Actually, a lot of the book is crude stereotypes.
There’s a whole section just titled ‘The French’,
which describes them as ‘sensually involved with each other.’
I used 3D modelling in order to create this design.
I'm using a software called ‘Maya’, and then we 3D printed it out.
It is 3D in nylon, in a technique called ‘selective laser sintering.’
You can see here a lot of difficult geometries that are very thin at places,
and they are very delicate.
The technique of selective laser sintering means that you have
basically a big box of powder, which is, in this case, nylon,
and you have your laser beam.
It’s sintering out,
it’s materialising exactly the model you created.
Basically, when you take this design out,
you're taking it from a big basket of powder,
and all the powder is falling off.
The proximity sensors are in this dress,
so they're in the front of the dress
and they are sensing in a beam that's being sent to the microcontroller
which is in the back piece.
As a scientific theory, the field of proxemics is vague.
Hall just sort of thought it up and stated it in his book.
There aren’t many studies backed up with rigorous examination and statistics.
It’s mostly a set of observations and ideas.
But despite what some hyper-rationalist people might think, those have value too.
Being aware of the hidden rules that guide us,
asking why we act the way we do:
that can be a powerful tool for figuring out the way that the world works.
And visualising something that isn't just invisible,
but is actually an abstract concept?
That can be a really powerful way to help understand yourself.
Thanks to Anouk Wipprecht!
Her dress is on display
at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco until March 2017.
Pull down the description for more links
about her, the dress and the gallery.