Tabula Rasa

Brief

A master brief was provided by the Science Museum, as part of a design competition in which the task was to design a product which could be sold under the Science Museum brand in supermarkets that would attract people to visit the Museum itself.

Concept Abstract

A shirt enhanced with an iterative, user programmable video display; supported by an online community and unique user generated content, it is this user interaction which is at the very core of the concept; without it the shirt is simply a science novelity, something which is cool but soon forgotten; with the community it becomes something more, it becomes an unpredictable focal point of creative forces, a blank slate upon which people can impress their own identity; Tabula Rasa .

Inspiration

The inspiration for this concept came from watching the Amine series “Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo”, in which the distinctive art style has character's clothing and hair detailed and decorated with often complex patterns which remain static in relation to the character's movement, meaning that as the characters move the patterning of their clothing changes.

Medium

Hand drawn and digital images.

Tools

Copic Markers, fine liner pens, pastel, Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Illustrator CS.

Aesthetic Abstract

A long bodied, short sleeve shirt, with hidden fasteners, epaulettes, and a mandarin collar. However the tailoring is secondary to the technology in this shirt, with the most dominating feature being a 5”x14”1 display down the left front panel of the shirt.

The aesthetic of the display is limited only by the imagination and artistry of the user community, and the physical limitations of the display technology itself, these limitations are discussed below.

Technological Abstract

The display is all important to this design, it needs to be light weight, low power consumption, high visibility, low heat output, and most importantly not made using glass.

Up until now any one of the available display technology could fulfil only some of those qualities, and was without exception made using a glass substrate. Within the last few years however a new technology has begun come of age called Electronic Ink (E-Ink). While currently only available commercially in a ‘display on glass’ TFT format, in the next few years a flexible plastic substrate should make its way out of the labs. Even in its current hybrid E-Ink on TFT format, the resulting displays are half the thickness and thus weight of reflective LCDs, at slightly less than 1mm in thickness. In the proposed E-Ink on plastic format the displays are less than half a millimetre in thickness and are flexible into the bargain.

E-Ink uses a cell like structure, each cell contains a transparent fluid, suspended in this fluid are two sets of micro pellets, one positively charged, one negatively charged, these contain the pigments which go to make up the image. By default these pellets would contain black in one set, white in the other, but in theory any pigments could be used allowing for interesting qualities like UV reactive colours or metallic hues.

When a negative charge is passed through the electrode above a cell, the positively charged micro pellets move to the top, and the negatively charged to the bottom. When a positive charge is passed through the top electrode, the opposite happens, revealing the other colour. If there are more than one pair of electrodes per cell then different shades can be achieved, Phillips currently use an E-Ink on TFT display in one of their e-book reader which is sold in Japan that is capable of 2bit grey-scale, meaning that it can produce black and white, and has two different ways of producing a 50% grey shade.

Customisation

The whole idea behind Tabula Rasa is that it be fully user customisable, there has already been an enthusiastic acceptance of user customisation in the mobile phone market. So it should be easy to introduce the idea of customisable clothing to the general public, especially if it is simple to use.

The standard means of customising the displays would be through the use of on shirt menus, controlled by a directional pad and select button, with more complex information being entered with a telephone like number pad.

Displays which would be built into the shirt would be relatively simple ones such as scrolling text of various types, and a few simple fractal type patterns. The basic set of displays which would be provided on the SD card which comes with the start-up pack would be both varied and versatile, ranging from surrealist dreamscapes, to time controlled cityscapes, to falling snowflakes, to moving star fields.

Customisation options for the solo shirt are relatively limited, the really radical changes start to happen once a computer is added to the equation. Using the supplied software it would be possible to customise the shirt in much more complicated ways than is possible, or indeed sensible, to do directly on the shirt. The core component of the software suite would function much like Flash in many respects, using a combination of static animations and dynamic animations based around a code language. Graphics would be mostly vector in nature, with raster graphics being used only where an effect is unobtainable through vector means. Text would be achieved through the use of standard True Type and Open Type fonts, both within the design software and the shirt itself, this allows quick access to thousands of ready made and freely available fonts, as opposed to a proprietary format which would require new fonts to be created, or old ones converted.

The other advantage to using a computer would be access to the Tabula Rasa website, which would contain new exclusive display programs, tutorials for using the software, and the information necessary for more technical users to program their own displays from scratch. It would also provide the framework for an online community to form, as it is from such communities that the most creative and unexpected uses for devices come.

Genetics Pack

This is the real hook for the project, the thing which will get people into the Science Museum itself, not just earn money for it. The Genetics Pack is something which would be, initially at least, sold exclusively by the Science Museum, at the Science Museum. After 6 months or so it could safely move onto the Museum’s website shop and Tabula Rasa’s own website, with the lure of exclusive content if you actually go to the Science Museum in future.

The Idea behind the Genetics pack is to take the customisability and individuality of what is displayed to the extreme. Using the data provided by the DNA profile the programs supplied in the pack generate patterns which are totally unique to the person wearing the shirt. These patterns would range from the classic rotating double helix, to fractals which use the DNA data as variables, to fantastical landscapes generated on the fly based on the DNA data. The possibilities are nearly endless, especially when you consider that all the DNA would be to the shirts software is a very long string of numbers, which can be applied as variables.