WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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In 1963, an anthropologist called
Edward T. Hall

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realised there was no term for the study of
personal space,

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so he invented one.

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Because that's the sort of thing that anthropologists
like to do.

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He called it ‘proxemics’, and it caught
on,

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because it turned out to be a good way to
let people think about abstract questions

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like:

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how do you react when someone gets too close,
too fast?

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What we have here is a robotic spider dress.

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So it’s a dress that has mechanical limbs
that are reacting.

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It is reacting on you coming closer, so you
coming near.

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There are two proximity sensors here.

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They are in the balls of the design.

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They are sensing when you come too close.

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There are 12 states that are pre-programmed.

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Basically, it’s deciding between 1 of those
12 states

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in order to create one of these animations.

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In his book, Hall proposes four distance zones:

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the public, the social, the personal and the
intimate.

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Now, in the sort of life coaching seminars
that people get sent to,

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and in middle management textbooks,

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those zones are treated as gospel,

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as 'this is how everyone behaves'.

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But in Hall’s own words, the zones were
only a first approximation.

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They were based on a tiny sample of university
educated Americans.

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They weren’t representative of human behaviour
in general,

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and they weren’t meant to be.

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They were crude stereotypes.

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Actually, a lot of the book is crude stereotypes.

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There’s a whole section just titled ‘The
French’,

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which describes them as ‘sensually involved
with each other.’

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I used 3D modelling in order to create this
design.

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I'm using a software called ‘Maya’, and
then we 3D printed it out.

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It is 3D in nylon, in a technique called ‘selective
laser sintering.’

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You can see here a lot of difficult geometries
that are very thin at places,

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and they are very delicate.

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The technique of selective laser sintering
means that you have

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basically a big box of powder, which is, in
this case, nylon,

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and you have your laser beam.

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It’s sintering out,

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it’s materialising exactly the model you
created.

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Basically, when you take this design out,

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you're taking it from a big basket of powder,

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and all the powder is falling off.

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The proximity sensors are in this dress,

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so they're in the front of the dress

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and they are sensing in a beam that's being
sent to the microcontroller

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which is in the back piece.

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As a scientific theory, the field of proxemics
is vague.

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Hall just sort of thought it up and stated
it in his book.

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There aren’t many studies backed up with
rigorous examination and statistics.

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It’s mostly a set of observations and ideas.

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But despite what some hyper-rationalist people
might think, those have value too.

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Being aware of the hidden rules that guide
us,

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asking why we act the way we do:

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that can be a powerful tool for figuring out
the way that the world works.

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And visualising something that isn't just
invisible,

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but is actually an abstract concept?

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That can be a really powerful way to help
understand yourself.

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Thanks to Anouk Wipprecht!

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Her dress is on display

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at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco until
March 2017.

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Pull down the description for more links

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about her, the dress and the gallery.