Published on July 16, 2024
Reported by Kate Landis for Urban@UW
What if a denim jacket could tell the stories of people impacted by housing inequality across the country? Resistive Threads, a project that was awarded a Urban@UW SPARK grant in 2023, was recently awarded a Honorable Mention at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference, which is a top-tier venue for peer-reviewed human-computer interaction (HCI) and design research. The Honorable Mention put them in the top 5% of 700 submissions.
Daniela Rosner and Afroditi Psarra, Associate Professors in Human Centered Design & Engineering at UW, and Brett Halperin, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow & PhD Candidate in the same discipline, led the project and publication. They partnered with creatives William Rhodes and CHANNELS (Kai Leshne), as well as the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), Washington Community Action Network, Be:Seattle, and Rolla Renters Association, to create an electronic denim jacket that plays music, poems, and stories of Black residents’ urban struggles alongside moments of joy and successes in fights for justice.
The electronic denim jacket refashions the AEMP’s (Dis)location Black Exodus print zine into a digital, wearable format. The jacket builds upon the (Dis)location series both materially and spatially as a multi-city coalition spanning sites of community partnership including the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, St. Louis, and New York City. It foregrounds themes of place, space, and belonging, as well as aims to raise awareness for urban issues related to intersections of housing, climate, and racial (in)justice.
The jacket contains a LilyPad MP3 microcontroller loaded with audio files, embedded wearable speakers, and interactive patches sewn with conductive thread that trigger the audio to play from the speakers when tapped upon with a metal thimble attached to a chain necklace. Some of the materials come directly from the zine, while other aspects extend the zine content through new artistic collaborations. All of the audio tracks in the jacket can be listened to on a playlist, which connects to the jacket via a QR code printed on a patch.
The team plans to continue working together, to exhibit the artifact in more cities beyond Seattle, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as explore the possibility of CHANNELS wearing the jacket while performing his music on tour. They will also work on other ways of addressing urban inequities through creative design mechanisms that build upon the knowledge produced in this process. Check out the video documentation and a blog post about this innovative project.
SPARK Grant Recipients Win Honorable Mention for Interactive Jacket