Interview with 2019 FashionTech Competition Winner, Nüwa
Read below an interview with FashionTech Competition Winners Minrisot and Chen Bing.
FashioNXT: Tell us about your winning design; what does it do?
A：What if people could grow materials by themselves and design their own adaptable clothing? Our concept is combining art, biohacking, engineering, open-source communities into a fashion product. To be truly carbon neutral, we need to take inspiration from nature. We got inspired by the natural cycle of life for all living organisms like physarum polycephalum which can create a material that is useful for our fabric. From our research and previous bio-art work, this organism has astonished us with its abilities, functions, and beauty and has triggered the design and the ideas. Our clothing comes in a fully customizable kit of 3 types of elements. A 3D printed exoskeleton interconnected with silicon threading and conductive wiring. Our biomaterial grows on a silk-based mesh. Growing and designing your own clothes can be compared to the creative process of planting and cultivating one’s own banzai tree. The exoskeleton allows integrating robotics into the wearable elements, making it not just a garment but a bio-augmented aesthetic solution for people who lost their limbs. The road to Singularity needs to be guided not only by technological advances but by integrating, adapting, and understanding the planetary consciousness. This is an innovation of natural materials. To change the fashion industry in a systematic way, people can make their own clothing through the system, we have imagined. We hope to use clothing to stirpeople's creativity and strengthen the connection between humans and society. From our works, you can see the beauty of interdisciplinary integration and people can work about more possibilities for the fashion
industry in the future.
这是天然材料的一项创新。对于服装行业的系统的创新，将服装模块化，人们可以通过我
们设想的系统制作专属于自己的服装。我们希望利用服装引导人们创造的同时，加强人类
与社会的联结。
由我们的作品中看到跨学科结合的魅力，研发人们思考未来服装行业的更多可能性。
FashioNXT: How did you find out about FashioNXT
A: The link to the FashioNXT competition was by detao fashion studio and our teachers, they grouped students whose major is fashion design or technoetoic art, so we became a good team to join this competition. And we think this contest is really meaningful cause it really helps us to care about ourselves and think about human beings’ future. Through this competition, we have a deeper understanding of interdisciplinary
concepts.
FashioNXT: How do you see FashioNXT improve the competition?
A: We would like to see FashionNXT hold this competition every year and look forward to seeing more interesting ideas.
FashioNXT: As you know making tech fashionable is the biggest challenge for wearables, how do you approach fashion in your design?
A:
Our core idea for this design is " beauty is also a function". Guided by this idea, we first decompose the clothing and then draw inspiration from the aesthetics of human tissues and organs, biological network, and classical sculpture. Combined with the modeling and Growth Logic of biological network, it is composed of a 3D printed skeleton scaffold and a growing natural texture (image is generated based on the path induction mechanism of polycephalus). Based on the theory of cybernetics, the possibility of future garment system is
discussed.
我们对于这次设计的核心思想是：“美观也是一种功能”。我们围绕着这句话,先将服装进行
分解，再从人体组织器官，生物网络及古典雕塑的美学中汲取灵感，结合生物网络的造型
和生长逻辑，由3d打印骨骼的支架和可生长的自然纹理(基于多头泡黏菌的路径诱导机制生
成图像)组成。并联系现有科技，以控制论作为理论基础，探讨未来的服装的系统的可能性
。
FashioNXT: What are the challenges you are facing to take your product to (market your product) the next level?
A: At this stage, we hope to create a clothing editor (clothing generation platform) and an open-source community to modularize clothing. People can
customize through this platform, get corresponding DIY packages, and make their own clothing. We will create a system to guide people to create garments by themselves so as to strengthen the relationship between human beings and
society.
现阶段我们希望创造一个服装编辑器（服装生成平台）和开源社区，将服装模块化，人们
可以通过这个平台自定义，获得相应的DIY包裹，制作专属于自己的服装。我们将创造一个
系统，以服装作为一个切口引导人们创造，并期望以此能加强人类与社会的联结。
FashioNXT: What should people expect from you at your 2020 FashioNXT exhibit?
A: We want to have a performance in the show, dismantle and reorganize the clothes on the spot, so as to show the functions and different possibilities of
each dress directly.在秀场上做一个行为表演，当场拆卸重组服装，以此直观表现出每
件服装的功能和不同可能性。
