This studio was called “Inhabiting the Streets”. The first week we went to various shelters and got a feel of what it is like to run a shelter and what challenges they face on a daily basis. One  thing each shelter said was that there is only a limited amount of space each night. Each night they are faced with the difficult task of turning people away.

Throughout various urban areas there are anti-homeless spikes, benches,etc.  Instead of the homeless trying to find ways to combat these various obstacles we challenged ourselves with the idea of trying of creating an article of clothing which could help “rough sleepers” (people who sleep on the street). The idea we came up with was a transformable hammock. This dress which we created would be able to transform into a hammock by having storage pockets in the bottom of the dress as well as the shoulder pads. Our goal was to have a fashion forward dress be able to transform into something useful. This dress contained three pockets where each piece of the hammock was stored. The hammock was able to be zippered up in order to work. One struggle we faced was finding support for

Problem:Throughout various urban areas there are anti-homeless places around the city. In front of buildings and under bridges are anti-homeless preventions such as spikes, and benches divided in the middle.Around Boston there are homeless shelters that people can go to but they fill up quickly which leads to many people sleeping in the streets. Theses people are often moved by police.

Solution: We approached this problem by creating a wearable hammock that is comfortable,convenient and fashion forward.The wearable hammock is a dress that is fashionable. The dress can be worn throughout the day inside the dress is a pocket that contains a hammock for the bottom half of the body, at the top of the dress are shoulder pads that store the top half of the hammock.

Our project is made to help people empathize with sea turtles that often get caught in nets and drown from the lack of air. The dress has a motor in the back, which spins and would ideally tighten the dress around you, like a corset. We also thought your arms would get pulled to your side in a similar fashion but we didn't get that far.  The tightening dress makes you feel like a sea turtle caught in a net. 

The Connecting Desk Storage Unit connects to four sliding tables that can be configured in any way that suits the users. In total, the workspace can seat up to eight people with one large cubby, and well as one small one per person. The Connecting Desk Storage Unit can also be used as a standing desk for working on projects when the tables are not attached.

The tables at NuVu are fairly compact, but they still tend to take up too much space in the small studio that we work in. While students are working at the tables, they usually put their bag, lunch, and coat on the floor, causing people to trip over the items strewn across the floor. We set out to create a great storage option that would also conserve space, and act as a workspace as well.

We created three different designs for the Connecting Desk Storage Unit, or Spine, but later switched to just finishing two of them. One of the final two spines is a box with holes cut into it, and the other is a grid-like frame with rotating drawers inserted into the spaces in the grid. The two spines are designed to be the core of a NuVu workspace with tables that slide into the spine, and extra attachments on top of the spine for added functionality. While creating the Connecting Desk Storage Units, we ran into problems related to scaling down from full scale to small scale models, but eventually we were able to create full one-fourth scale models of the spines that will later be created in full scale.

Today Sasha and I got right to work. We 3D printed a bigger button and put it together with springs and and nails. We had to drill through it a bit because some of the holes, didn’t go all the way through. We cut the wire in half but didn’t put it into the button yet. We printed out our design for the felt and realized that where the corners of the stars and diamonds met, there was just a gap so we made the stars smaller. We also added holes for the eyelets. Rosa and Emily suggested we transfer the hexagonal pattern to the arm pieces, so we worked on those. It was frustrating to move and copy all the eyelets and then trim so that it looked good. In the end, I think we found a good pattern. I hope that tomorrow we can actually put the dress together with the electronic part and see if it works.

Today we made our second iteration and started working on our third. We realized that holes in the felt could rip easily. We decided to use cardboard with holes in it just like the arm pieces and put them down the side of the dress for the twine to go through. We screwed the pieces to the dress and put yarn through the cardboard. The problem was it wasn’t very stable because the cardboard would get pulled in but the dress wouldn’t. We thought we could add more screws but it would still be uncomfortable. With Rosa’s help, we realized that the best option was if the string went through the fabric itself and we could design a special eyelet so the the felt wouldn’t rip. I designed hexagon shaped eyelet with little hexagons around it, the pattern was meant to represent a turtle’s shell. We laser cut the eyelets with four small holes for screws that go through the fabric and connect to the eyelet part on the other side of the fabric. Sasha realized that the middle hexagons were too big, so we changed the design a bit so that there was a smaller circle for the string to go through.