description.

research question

fashion signals—their form and meanings—are directly dependent on time. the issue we are trying to address with urbanhermes is that the rate of change of physically-based personal objects eventually hits a ceiling; due to their static structure, they cannot be reproduced and distributed at the dynamic rate of information flow. for example, although the desire to adorn yourself differently may change every day, you wouldn't likely change the contents of your wardrobe on a daily basis. the cost would be great in terms of money, space, and time. however, transforming your digital persona by updating your blog on a daily, or even semi-hourly, basis wouldn't be out of the ordinary. electronic-based fashions, such as blog memes or online communications, are capable of rapid emergence and dispersion as they are not subject to constraints of materiality. since fashion signals display one's access to information at a particular point in time (and, hence, position on the fashion spectrum between trend-setter and mass-adopter), a physically-based visual signal that could visibly update as quickly as information flow enables one to imbue one's identity with timely, salient, and selective qualities.

the strength of urbanhermes also lies in its visual vocabulary of images. the ability to display, identify, categorize, and circulate images within a social environment creates a distinctively adaptive electronic currency of culture.

hypothesis

with a worn accessory that could dynamically display the most recent and self-defining fashion signal, as well as react depending on the wearer and the viewer, one would be able to convey more expressive and meaningful components of identity.

design features

please read the scenario sketches and the paper for a detailed description, but here listed are some particularly notable features of urbanhermes:

• the images are designed to be temporary: ephemerality motivates regular replenishing activity, keeping signals timely and current
• successive degradation: although the images are digital, with each change-of-hands the image quality degrades, enabling a secondary signal of "degrees away from the source"
• each image remembers its history: an image will trigger any nearby ones if they share the same source, or share an intersecting node in their traversal pathways
• signals of social connectivity: obtaining and sharing images can be strategic, as signals may be recognised as being connected to a desirable person, location, or niche
• selective display: users who are notified of nearby images have the option to display the shared image which may have a greater probability of being recognised
• user control: the display only changes with the user's consent, nothing visible is performed automatically. the user can ascertain the circumstance and environment, and act within that context.