How can we imagine the future of responsive retail environments?
Harvard GSD, Responsive Environments course
This course challenged us to propose novel interventions to improve the user shopping experience, focusing on human-to-human relationships or human-to-machine interactions. The experience could be focused on tangible factors such as architectural morphologies, spatial conditions, material patterns, store layouts, etc. or intangible parameters such as soundscapes, scent or color, cultural shifts, or digital trends.
Creative technologist along with Ngoc Doan and Julie Loiland
Our project, “Unsize Fits All”, features a hand-fabricated clothing hanger with an embedded LED light that reacts based on NFC signals. The hanger lights up when a user walks by with a matching size profile, eliminating the need for size labels or fit matching amidst a confusing field of vanity sizes and brand differences.
The finished hanger was laser-cut with acrylic and featured an adjustable color LED.
We iterated through various designs that would be attractive while encasing the LED arduino component.
Initially, we prototyped a version of the hanger that used a range detector to react when a shopper was within range to indicate a size match. As this was bulky and wouldn’t fit into a nice form factor of a hanger, we switched to a different technology.
The final version used Arduino with a tag reacting to NFC signals, which was a much smaller form factor and could be embedded in a clothing hanger.
