The Design Division at CCA welcomes Kristin Neidlinger as our second speaker in the 2022 Spring Design Lecture Series. These live lectures bring us together across time zones and disciplines as we meet leading designers, strategists, curators, and educators to speak about contemporary practice, discourse, and making. For the Spring 2022 Design Lecture Series we invite CCA alumni to share their design strategies and stories of success.
Kristin Neidlinger, Alumni of MFA Design 2010, returns to CCA to share her gorgeous and visionary work with wearables that translate biosignals into external communication of emotion. Her talk branches from her thesis at CCA, continues through partnerships, exhibitions, and innovations, and brings us to her current PhD research in the Netherlands, showing how she has translated skin conductivity, breath and heart rate to give the body a visual voice.
The auditory, visual and tactile displays of these translations promote what she calls “extimacy,” an external intimacy that communicates the wearer’s internal emotions to the outside world, while also offering valuable feedback to the wearer, since, she says, “We often don’t know how we feel.”
Neidlinger’s thesis at CCA explored devices for people with sensory processing disorders to help them express how they are feeling and to read other people. It included a device to help with slouching, a head piece to support meditation, and finally the “Galvanic Extimacy Responder,” a wearable collar that collects the same kind of information as a lie detector test but translates it into colors that correlate to emotional state.
The “Galvanic Extimacy Responder” was developed and featured in numerous exhibitions for eight years, allowing Neidlinger to build new contextual applications and branch into collaborative spaces with both wellness practitioners and new materials companies. The projects NeurotiQ, Awe, and Flexo all followed, ranging from woven headpieces that read brain signals to inflating, light-up responders that show excitement in one person and transmit to another. The Awe project uses 3D printed materials that flex, grow and glow, creating a kind of inflatable shell incorporated into clothing, looking like something between a mood ring and barnacle armor from the future.
Neidlinger has an enigmatic smile throughout, as she explains her work with acupressurists, astronauts, and caregivers in a rigorous and ambitious design and research practice. The work is mesmerizing and inspiring and highly recommended for Industrial and Interaction Designers as well as those building speculative wearables and narratives.
14 авг 2024
