MIURA ORI Skin

Shell of the New Earth.

“Lungs see what your eyes don’t”

“It’s like gambling, a lucky draw. Every day you wake up and look up at the sky and see how it goes. We’re powerless,”

“It was so sudden and we didn’t have time to plan anything,”

These were the words of the people living in Beijing on one of the capital’s first issued “Red Alert” days. This wasn’t a city under siege, this is a city under smog – dangerous levels of it.

Imagine a world so polluted that you have zero visibility at 5 metres. The air is toxic, so are water and food. Homo sapiens (man) is evolving to the new earth, as a result, there is no verbal communication among people. Their faces are covered with masks and they have developed a second skin which lets them see through the smog. They live in such an atmosphere that made them depressed. The responding skin becomes the communicating layer, as people are at close proximity. Emotions are expressed by the vibrations created through skin. The skin is evolved to be thermochromic. This is today’s “New Earth” where we live.

Materiability

Based on the final system for the proposed skin design, the following Material and Fabrication techniques are recommended:

Fabric: Laser cutting/ Folding
Thermochromics: casting
3D Printing: PLA
Fabric
Miura Fold / Origami

Fabric

Miura Fold / Origami
The Miura fold is a form of rigid origami, meaning that the fold can be carried out by a continuous motion in which, at each step, each parallelogram is completely flat. This property allows it to be used to fold surfaces made of rigid materials.

Thermochromics

Thermochromism is the property of substances to change colour due to a change in temperature. The two common approaches are based on liquid crystals and leuco dyes. Liquid crystals are used in precision applications, as their responses can be engineered to accurate temperatures, but their colour range is limited by their principle of operation.