p20
Smart textile services
Driessens & Verstappen participated in playing with rules, behaviors and challenging the status quo. They were invited for their fresh perspective on what we often consider straightforward. In the Smart Textile Services project, artists and fashion designers are invited to provide a fresh perspective on the challenge of designing smart textile services in the textile industry.
Erwin Driessens & Maria Verstappen
Our aim is that the group of FlowSteps act as if it were a super organism, influenced by player activity. In our current simulation, each FlowStep has an identification number and can listen to the messages that other FlowSteps broadcast. We assume that they can determine the relative proximity of neighbouring FlowSteps by analysing the strength of the incoming radio signal. After a while, when each FlowStep has formed an idea of its surroundings, it knows how dense the local environment is and this density measure affects its behaviour. As the player interacts with the play elements, by moving them around they change the configuration, thereby changing the dynamics of the Flow- Step super organism.
We have come up with a few simple FlowStep rules that seem to invite a variety of possible play scenarios:
These rules lead to chain reactions whose outcomes are somewhat unpredictable, as they are affected by the exact timings of the messages and the choice of neighbour to send the message to. The rules do not dictate what game to play. They are hidden from the players, who can learn them through interacting and experimenting with the FlowSteps. The actual dynamics of the simulation, showing the changing patterns that occur over time, is lost in the static images. They do, however, give an impression of how spatial arrangement can be a fertile game element.
Erwin Driessens— 1963 Maria Verstappen— 1964 notnot @ xs4all. nl
. Artists, experimenters, researchers at Driessens & Verstappen. Members CRISP project I-PE
1— Each FlowStep can be in one of two colour states, let’ s say blue or green. 2— Each FlowStep sends a“ I( 23) want you( 8) to become colour *” message. The numbers between brackets are the agent IDs and the asterisk is their current colour. The frequency of the message depends on the local density of agents, and the FlowStep will only send a message to a nearby FlowStep. 3— When a FlowStep is in a high-density environment( closely surrounded by at least 6 others), it will change its current colour. 4— When a FlowStep is pressed by a player, it changes colour. 5— When a FlowStep changes colour, it emits a specific sound, belonging to that colour.
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