A fun challenge I received from curator Kasalina Maliamu Nabakooza, was to try to make a paper-based tutorial that we could give away to visitors at an exhibition. So here’s my attempt at a paper-based personal space dress. (Based on this video of an origami umbrella: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVedgiY0pwc) I really enjoyed making the little drawings, might even try to apply the same style to some of the tech tutorials!
Here’s a PDF:
Apologies for the delay!! Learn how to make your own wearable fog machine and you can look like this…
Pretty much constantly. Make that cloud of fog you walk around in all day literal.
Link to tutorial: https://urbanarmor.org/portfolio/the-social-escape-dress/
If you are someone who looks at these tutorials, uses them in teaching, or uses portions of the tech in other projects, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a line at info@urbanarmor.org.
These ones have vibration motors which can be found in cheap electric toothbrushes or bought in bulk for less than $1 a pop. Going to try some other variations including motors from various E-waste. Free and open to the public Thursday, 6pm @ Mad Museum
Excited to announce that I will be working in an open-studio environment every Thursday at The Museum of Arts and Design in NYC, from June 01- September 21. More information here
Thursday evenings are free admission, and the artists who stay late rotate, I’ll be there tomorrow night from 6:30pm- 8:30! In addition to the regular day hours.
As I said in an earlier post, I’ve been working on some stuff lately that doesn’t necessarily fall under the “Urban Armor” umbrella. Here’s a piece from last Summer, a little robot to help my houseplants become more independent.
Tutorial for this one is here . I would classify this project as simple-medium. You do need to build a circuit to control the DC motors, but no motor shield required! (= money saved).
However in a similar robot I’ve been iterating lately I did find that the L239d, which is the IC in most motor shields, is helpful because it allows the bot to reverse and turn more gracefully. A good tutorial on how to get started with using that technique is here.
Next step for the Sunbot, aside from maybe swapping out the guts, will be to find a good recipe for bioplastic. I’d love to make the whole robot out of something biodegradable, so that in theory, the robot can really go into the wild, without causing any damage to the environment. I think casting the base will be easy, but I’m sure the wheels will prove tricky… as will the power situation. Right now I use a solar panel to charge a lipo battery, a solar panel alone doesn’t have enough juice to power the motors. Maybe I’ll start with smaller plant for the next one…
Was excited to wake up to an email saying I’d been mentioned on the Adafruit blog I’m a huge fan of their stuff and tutorials so was excited to see that. The Social Escape Dress was also featured in racked.com recently, in what I thought was a really nice piece on wearable tech.
I have definitely gotten behind on making tutorials! And on keeping up with my web presence in general. (I was thinking of getting an instagram finally, but my fear is that all the good names are already taken?!) But I have been working away! Experimenting with lots of stuff, not all of it wearable, but hopefully will get the updates going more regularly this summer.
In the meantime, while we wait on these tutorials to go live, if you’re interested in how I achieved something technically, please contact me directly! info@urbanarmor.org I’m happy to talk about how I made any of the pieces and I do have lots of pictures of the guts/inner-workings.
I was lucky enough to spend some time speaking with Kevin Foust, as part of his podcast series, “People of the IOTS.” You can listen to our conversation here: People of the IOTS- Kathleen McDermott, as well as listen to conversations with several other interesting movers and makers!
Hi there! A new Urban Armor project in the works will relate to words that make us cringe. For example, my sister cringes when she hears the word, “moist.” I’d like to collect your words, fill out your cringe word below!
Urban Armor has received a lot of press recently, which is pretty cool! Some of this coverage has left people confused, are the Urban Armor pieces products? The answer to this is NO they are not products. I consider this project an artwork, which is why we can be playful and fun, sometimes at the expense of what’s practical. 🙂
If you’re interested in my perspective on the pieces, as an artist, please contact me directly at info@urbanarmor.org. Thanks for reading!
A few things still need to get sorted out on the site, I’m still working on the Miss-My-Face tutorial, and on some layout issues. Keep checking in with us please, our project library should be growing in coming months! Thanks!
Urban Armor 