HEIM:FERN

HEIM:FERN is an intelligent textile device that allows you to feel the weather. In a public environment, you can experience the weather of different places in an unique way. In addition to the movement of the textiles themselves, the lighting and temperature also change.
The showroom will also have ambient lighting and realistic sound to give you an immersive experience. In addition to the showroom, you can also experience the weather in your loved one‘s city from home in a small private version. Through the accompanying app, you can enjoy the NFT generated by live weather from around the world and connect to your device to experience it.

Communication is constantly evolving, everything is getting better, faster, more digital. But how can new technologies redefine and bring to life a sense of connection and closeness?

The task is to develop scenarios and interactive products using smart textiles that can expand our remote communication and thus promote a feeling of connection across distances

01 RESEARCH AND ANALYSTS

In my research and design exploration, I focused on the potential of smart textiles in enhancing remote communication. Through trend analysis and a field excursion to TITV Greiz, I gained in-depth insights into the technology, manufacturing processes, and application prospects of smart textiles, categorizing their use into health, transportation, entertainment, and communication. At the same time, I applied the Persona method, conducting interviews with real users to uncover their needs and challenges in cross-cultural living, long-distance communication, and maintaining emotional connections. The study revealed that weather is not only a natural phenomenon but also an important emotional link when people are separated by distance. Using User Journey Maps and SWOT analysis, I identified the core obstacles in remote communication and developed the design question: How might we make the sharing of weather experiences more emotionally resonant? This analytical process not only laid the foundation for my design concept but also demonstrates my strength in combining systematic research, user insights, and design methodologies.

By finding and classifying design products for smart textiles, we learn about the basic functions and possible design directions of smart textiles. trendboard informs us about the direction and possibilities of our designs.

We have divided the collected examples of smart textile products into four broad categories: health, transport, entertainment and communication. The interaction mode for most smart textiles is sensory conversion – sensory impressions. One example is the conversion of music into vibrations. The products take the form of wearable devices, clothing and furniture textiles.

Excursion to TITV Greiz

We visited our partner TITV Greiz, an institute for smart textiles. There, we gained a deeper understanding of smart textiles, saw a wide range of textiles, and learned about the classification, functional technology, manufacturing processes, and practical applications of smart textiles.

02 PERSONA

This is a method that expands on the real persona approach by allowing users to participate in the project as design mentors in the spirit of co-creation. The design mentor is a person who has no design background. As an external person, he or she provides valuable insights and contributes new ideas. He or she accompanies the project not temporarily, but throughout its entire course – from research to the final product.

We looked for a total of three people to help us with the design as design mentors and personas. Interviews were conducted to observe their lives in detail so that we designers could better empathise with our users. We try to find difficult and joyful moments in their lives to inspire our designs so that we can better help our users. We asked Persona for basic information about her age, occupation and gender in order to understand the basic conditions of her existence. We ask questions about the topics we have selected (long-distance communication, pets, weather, life in a heterocultural society), observe her life in the relevant contexts and analyse her psychological and behavioural motivations.

We asked Persona for basic information about her age, occupation and gender in order to understand the fundamentals of her life. We asked questions about the topics we had selected (long-distance communication, pets, weather, life in a heterocultural society), followed her life in the relevant contexts for a selected week and analysed her psychological and behavioural motivations. Finally, we created information cards for each of them in the form of a table, summarising and analysing their positive and negative experiences, thus identifying the pain points and sweet points.

Persona — Tian Yu

Persona — Tu

Persona — Xian Zhu

03 DEFINING THE PRIMARY ISSUES AND BRAINSTORMING

During our research on Persona, we identified a number of issues based on their experiences. Due to the globalisation of society and the coronavirus pandemic, people are separated from their families and friends for long periods of time while migrating for work or study, and they have to communicate remotely more often. Are traditional communication methods (video calls, phone calls, text messages) really effective in reducing the distance between people? Could there be a new way to increase the intimacy of long-distance relationships? We have selected three areas that we want to explore in a relevant context.

In the brainstorming and SWOT analysis, we identified the core challenge of remote communication: people struggle to build a genuine sense of connection across distance. While weather is often used as a conversation starter, it is typically conveyed through data and images, lacking emotional resonance and making it difficult to empathize with each other’s environment. Users expect immediate feedback and prefer emotionally enriched weather information rather than dry facts and pictures. This insight provided crucial guidance for our subsequent design direction.

Personal wall decorations can be changed to show the
weather and simulate the weather; e.g. fluctuations to simulate the size of the wind, etc. The display can also be used to indicate heat and cold.

A and B share the weather in their cities via the app and they can follow the app's instructions to find a location in their city that has the same weather as the other's, pick that location
and feel the weather in the other's city from there.

A chair or sofa with smart textiles. It can be placed at home or in public places.
The private version allows you to feel the environment by selecting a different
location (such as the environment your family is in) in relative privacy through the app. The public version allows you to experience the live weather of different cities.

04 SPECIFIED TASK ASSIGNMENT

Weather as a connection Weather as a medium for getting closer

Based on the problem of not being able to ‘really’ connect with the people closest to us, such as friends or family, across distances, we observed that weather is a central topic in shared communication, whether it is to keep up to date or to compensate for homesickness or wanderlust.

However, it is difficult to describe the weather or convey the feeling and develop empathy for the environmental conditions of the other person. Weather is still only shown through ‘dry’ data and photos. But could we interpret and visualise weather differently?

Product Process Structure

Ideale User Journey Map For Public Vision

Ideale User Journey Map For Private Vision

05 DRAFTING PROCESS — WEATHER TRANSLATION

With the help of our professor, we tried to find a way to simulate the weather with our product, and after some discussion, we finally found the way. The idea was to summarise how different types of weather feel by using different adjectives for each type of weather and thinking about how we could use movement, light and shadow, sounds, etc. to convey the different types of weather.

We summarised and analysed all the weather types in a mood board. We also searched for a lot of weather videos and finally found ways to replace the different weather types and use them in our products by using the movement, light, sound, vibrations, etc. of the products to express the different weather types.

Sunny

1. Bright,cheery,cheerful,joyous,light,shining
2. Resemblingthesun,warmedbytheraysofthesun

All petals open up, light under them shining through simulation the sunlight

Cloudy

1. Fulloforovercastbyclouds
2. Little to no sunshine, gloomy, closed off, pressing down on you, a dark cloud

All petals are slowly closing, pressing each other down imitating the gloomy feeling, lights are dimmed

Windy

1.Swept by the wind, howling
2.Breezy, moody, random, playful, strong and soft
The petals are closing and opening in waves after each other like a wind breeze brushing through leaves, shaking in different speeds, domino effect

Rainy

1. Lightorheavyrainfall,downpour,wet
2. Raindrops

The background lighting is dimmed, random points of white light shine on the leaves quickly like raindrops hitting the ground while the petals are randomly closing and opening up

Snowy

1. Covered with snow, snow-white
2. Soft,powdery,spotless,fragile,delicate

The background lighting is bright, random points of black light hitting the leaves, slowly fading away like snowflakes melting on the ground, the leaves are slowly closing while most lay flat

06 DRAFTING PROCESS — FORM FINDING

As the name suggests, the shape of the individual ‘blossoms’ is inspired by the composition and arrangement of mushrooms, flowers and bird feathers, creating a dynamic and organic effect when viewed as a whole.

As the name suggests, the shape of the individual ‘flowers’ is inspired by the composition and arrangement of mushrooms, blossoms and bird feathers, appearing dynamic and organic when viewed as a whole.

Form finding: the basis

Form finding: the blossoms

07 PROTOTYPE CONSTRUCTION

After some discussion, we decided to build 3 prototypes.

The first is a miniature model that represents the final product on a specific scale to show what our product will look like. However, this model is not functional.

The second model is a functional model. This model is smaller and shows how the small parts on top of our product will move. It also has lights underneath that show how the product works.

The third model is a heat generation model. We obtained a material from our partner company TITV that generates its own heat, and we fused it with our model to create a heat model that shows how heat is generated.

Miniature model

The base material of the model is an MDF board. The shape of the base plate is cut out with a laser and the three parts are glued together to form a base plate.
The small pieces of fabric were also cut with the laser, while we glued all the fabrics onto the plate in an irregular arrangement to give the whole model a more attractive appearance.

Functional model

Once we had found the right expressions, we combined various conversion expressions with our products. The movement of each small part of our product was converted into an expression of the weather, while vibrations, sound and light were used to bring all the sensations of the weather to life as vividly as possible.

Heat generation model

This model demonstrates the heating function of our products, which can be used to simulate weather conditions by changing the temperature.
We obtained our heating component from our partner company TITV. After studying it, we combined it with our model, wired it, soldered it, and so on, and finally, our model automatically heats up when connected to the power supply to change the temperature.

FINAL RESULT

AT DUTCH DEISGN WEEK

AT HTW WERKSCHAU 2022

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Based in Berlin – Available for collaboration worldwide.