Tech & Textile
Dreams made real with engineering and design . BY SAVANNAH MUÑOZ ’ 21
IT STARTED as a dream for alumna Saura Naderi ’ 07 . A self-described lonely and awkward kid , she would often imagine herself walking down her high school hallway in a billowy , slow-moving dress that undulated from below with tentacles like Medusa ’ s hair . It may look a bit bizarre , ominous even , but then its tendrils would reach out … searching for someone to hug .
“ I might look like this dark , mysterious woman when the dress isn ’ t activated , but I ’ m not . I wanted the dress to have a magical , impressive moment ,” she says .
This dream of such a dress stayed with Naderi through community college and then UC San Diego , and finally in the position she landed at the tech company Qualcomm in 2013 , where she led engineering and design outreach as co-founder of its Thinkabit Lab . This was where she pitched the idea of using robotics to make a dress come to life , and recruited a group of engineers , software developers , and coders to help .
They could certainly help with the robot part , but not so much the dress . So Naderi returned to her alma mater and sought out the UC San Diego costume design program . With the help of graduate student Jaymee Ngernwichit ’ 11 , MFA ’ 17 , then a student of professor Judy Dolan , along with the seamstresses who make up UC San Diego ’ s costume shop , Naderi was aided in bringing this dress out of her imagination and into the world .
“ I worked on the dress , or the skin , you could say . The engineers then were responsible for the skeleton and the programming for how it works together ,” says Ngernwichit . “ We had very pragmatic things to keep in mind ,
40 TRITON | WINTER 2021