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Sophia Brueckner
Assistant ProfessorSophia Brueckner is a futurist artist, designer and engineer who has worked at Google and conducted research at RISD and the MIT Media Lab, exploring the relationship between interfaces, cognition and mental health. She also teaches a course on science-fiction prototyping and design ethics.
Rachel Freire is an artist and designer who combines material innovation, electronics and traditional craftsmanship. After launching her conceptual fashion label at London Fashion Week in 2009, she became the textile designer of mi.mu gloves, a gestural interface for composing and performing music.
Together, Brueckner and Freire explore the intersection of fashion and wearable technology, combining the expressive potential of clothing with haptic technologies to empower wearers to shape their own cyborg identities.
A collaboration between Sophia Brueckner and Rachel Freire, the Embodisuit allows its wearer to map signals onto different places on their body. Informed by embodied cognition, the suit receives signals from an IoT platform, and each signal controls a different haptic actuator on the body. Knowledge is experienced ambiently without necessitating the interpretation of symbols by the conscious mind. The suit empowers wearers to reconfigure the boundaries of their selves strengthening their connection to the people, places, and things that are meaningful to them. It both critiques and offers an alternative to current trends in wearable technology. Most wearables harvest data from their users to be sent and processed elsewhere. The Embodisuit flips this paradigm such that data is taken in through the body instead. Furthermore, we hypothesize that by changing the way people live with data, it will change the type of data that people create.
