Our studio is a workshop in which we construct wearables for dancers in the exhibit, On Display. On Display is trying to change people's ideas of beauty, by using dancers with disabilities. It gives the audience a chance to disregard society's obsession with body image. My group is creating a wearable for Heidi Latsky, the head of On Display. Heidi does not have disability, however she feels very vulnerable about her image, and age. We decided that this feeling of vulnerability is something we could represent in a wearable very well.

Our project is a necklace, with many detachable pieces of armor connected to it. Throughout the show, Heidi will slowly take off the pieces of armor until only the necklace is left. This is meant to represent her getting over her vulnerability. Heidi performs a very serious and physical dance nearing the end of the show, and doing it with the armor attached would be very restrictive. This is another reason for why we decided it would be important for her armor to be stripped fully off at some point. Heidi wants everything to be white during her shows. This became an obstacle we had to overcome because it limited us to a very minimal amount of materials, however we were very lucky because Acrylic, the material we knew we wanted to use, came in white. Most of our project is created out of this white acrylic. The triangle pieces that the necklace is primarily made out of is white acrylic, as well as the plates of armor. Our wearable is a very meaningful piece of art. We hope this project can encourage people watching to let themselves show their true form, and not let themselves feel self conscious about who they are.

Our project is a mobile prosthetic that stimulates contralateral movement in the arms, training the forearms to mimic the natural human gait. 

The Armomat is a portable prosthetic which forces one arm to move back when the other is pushed forward, and vice versa. We created this project for a person named Joe, who suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was 18 years old, and has very little control over his right arm. He told us that he had trouble maintaining his balance when walking due to the fact that his left arm does not perform the natural human gait.  Because he cannot control it, Joe has to hold his weak arm with the arm he has control over, and we wanted to create something that would assist him. After two very work intensive weeks, my partner and I created several different iterations of methods that would help Joe walk normally, and after encountering countless issues, we created the Armomat.