The intention of this project is to create a wearable sculpture for Anita that embodies her personality and physical differences.

Our project has the intention of bringing Anita’s love of mermaids, the parts of her body that are missing, and asymmetry.

This dress has two main components. First, the wooden kites are made to be the structure of the dress. Each one of them has a piece cut out of the middle, each different cut has a different size, this is so that as the dress goes from her left top right side the holes close showing less of her leg. The next piece is a string that connects each of the columns to each other. This string is able to stretch which allows the dress to curve to Anita’s body and in the future servos would be used to make the dress move like the tail of a mermaid.

The main design challenge we faced was finding the right shape to make the pieces that form the main dress. We went through multiple different iterations that all worked in some ways but also had disadvantages in other ways.  

The first iteration of our project was made out of cardboard pieces shaped like lemons. For this iteration we used 12 pieces and connected them vertically, using screws horizontally using rubber bands. The reason we used a combination of screws and rubber bands was that it allows the dress to have structure while conforming to Anita’s body.

Our second iteration completely changed the shape of the pieces. Instead of a lemon shape, we decided to change them to a kite-like shape. Another thing that we added into this iteration was the addition of cut outs in the pieces. We deiced to have 12 different sized cut outs, we did this because it decreases weight and allows us to emphasize the positive and negative space on her body. We put the most open pieces of wood to the left side of Anita’s body because it shows the openness of her missing leg. We then put the most closed pieces on the right side of her body to add positive space. We decided to make an asymmetrical hem to completely cover her right leg.