Maker Frames

Project Overview

Cosplay is a form of creative expression which entails creating worn displays, modeling existing or fictional characters. It’s a form of hobbyist costume creation in which individuals construct their own wearable art pieces to be displayed at social gatherings. However, these costume creators are often confronted with the limitations of their skillset when it comes to creating dynamic, moving and interactive costumes. We saw an opportunity to bridge the gap of knowledge and skills between hobbyist costume creators and the possibilities of the technology we have at our disposal. We wanted to allow these creative minds to express themselves fully and extend their scope of creative ideas.

February 2019
3 Months Execution Time
Design Project
Eindhoven University of Technology

Teammates
     Mingco - BA Industrial Design
     Ananya - BA Industrial Design
     Thomas - BA Industrial Design

What is Maker Frames about?

1. Expression: allowing creator to express themselves fully
2. Creativity: enable a greater set of creative ideas
3. Empowerment: allow people to do something by themselves that they were not capable of before

How does it work?

1. Choose

the creator chooses a template frame

2. Program

the creator programs the frame with the help of guidance on the website

3. Get creative

the creator implements the frame in a costume

PROCESS

In this project we worked with a very specific target group, the cosplay community. In the team, no one was familiar with this target group. This made this project an exciting challenge. Since the online resources with information about this target group are scarce, we had to make sure we directly connected with people in the community, to get to the level of true understanding that designing in my opinion requires.
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Through social media and other online resources we managed to connect with a decent number of costume creators. Amazingly one cosplayer even committed to collaborating with us on site. She was thinking alongside us and steering our process back to where it needed to go to meet the needs of the cosplayers we were designing for.

Understanding the community

After ethnographic inquiries with a range of different cosplayers it became clear that cosplayers all had one thing in common. They all wanted more. They all wanted to make their costumes bigger, bolder, better than the ones they had created before. They wished they could make their costumes come to life, be as real as possible. However, they felt held back, limited by their skills and resources. This is where we saw an opportunity.

Common desires

After ideating on possible ways to aid cosplayers in their creative processes, we concluded we wanted to provide a toolkit that could help cosplayers embed interactive and moving elements in their costumes. After various iterations and constant evaluation with our collaboration partner we arrived at a combination of structural frames (with integrated electronics), tutorials and guidance through an online platform. This would allow creators to build moving and interactive costumes using our frames as a base. This way we would bypass the knowledge gap that costume creators experience.
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The frames could be morphed into various costume designs. Each body part would have a template frame and these frames could then be programmed as the cosplayer desires, by programming them with pre-made or custom created code. The frames would have embedded micro controllers (in our case Arduino) and electronics. With the guidance from tutorials and professionals that run the online channels for the frames, there is no need to have any sort of prior knowledge of programming.

Concept

In this project we fully explored the user experience we were envisioning. We chose to create an arm frame and then each team member took the opportunity to experience what it would be like to build this frame into a moving costume. My teammates build a lizard costume and a mermaid costume. I chose to create a robot costume. In this creation process I was able to assess what the needs of the envisioned users were.

We programmed the frame in different ways for the different costumes

Slow: for the mermaid costume

Accelerated: for the lizzard costume

Fast: for the robot costume

In this project I took the position of team leader. This was not a position I had taken on before, but I felt ready. Guiding the team and taking responsibility for whatever issues the team ran into was challenging, but also more educational than expected.

I learned to understand myself better as a designer throughout this team project. It became clear to me that there are three main things I value in collaborative teamwork.

Structure:
I personally will always do anything I can to keep an overview of what is going on. Planning ahead, dividing tasks and redirecting are like second nature to me. I see it as my task in teamwork to get everyone on the same wavelength, to make the team work to come together for a common goal.
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Communication:
The communication was a challenge in this team project, because there were some personalities that could clash. And they did. We had some small conflicts in this team, and putting myself in the position of mediator comes naturally. I am not scared to speak up and can find empathy for all players involved. This helped me facilitate professional conversations. Through focusing on building mutual respect the team structure became more resilient.
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Reflection:
Constant reflection has been a habit of mine for years. I like to understand why things happened the way they did and learn from that. This project was the first one in which I also saw the need for reflective habits in design processes. Now I took the role of team leader I was suddenly very aware when we were drifting away from the project goal or drifting apart from each other as a team. I felt the responsibility to seek a way to overcome or even prevent this. I chose to implement small reflective sessions. These frequent reflective sessions were a great addition to the workflow we had in this project and helped us face upcoming issues before they started to properly manifest.
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MAKER FRAMES

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