Team: Jia Ni Yu, Lydia Yan, Mia Zhang
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The center piece of the dress inspires the hair strip mechanism of our project.
This series of hair sculpture focus on the choice of meterial and the relationship between the concept and the material choice.
Hair Highway explores the potential of human hair beyond its wildly expanding role in the beauty industry.
Almost all mammals have hair. Human hair has degraded from both a quantitive and functional perspective. For animals, hair are covered most part of body. And usually, different kinds of hair has their specific functions. For most of the animals, fur can be serve as protection of the body, for lions, hair showcase their status in the group, while for horses, they can even using hair to communicate information. But for humans, we barely have hairs, and the basic and fundamental function of hairs mostly have vanished. With the species evolution and socialization, we lost our hair, both the essence and its meaning. What could this mean to us?
With the development of technology, it seems that we can retrieve and revive some ancient function and meanings through the contemporary technologies. Using sensors and mechanisms, we try to replicate the communication function of human hair.
To augment human hair’s degraded sensations, we focus on the representation and visualization of the hair’s interaction with surroundings triggered by the nervous system transmitting signals beneath skin and muscles. In research, we discover that the male lion mane(lion’s face hair) plays functions of protection, sexual hormone communication, and a pure display of muscularity by looking larger and stronger. We intend to represent these features in our project with a mechanical wearable installation of two parts — one featuring reactions to stimuli, the other featuring the natural breath under the hair.
Sketch