Feeling Climate Change: Intersections of Every Day Cycling and Climate Change

Crafting the High Water Pants

This medium post reflects the design and creation of my Master of Design thesis at the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design. It details the concept of the High Water Pants and the process of creating them. Although I consider the entire process research, please read further into my preliminary, grounds-building research and my design ideation phases of this thesis.

Riding in the second iteration of the High Water Pants which I used for user testing.

The High Water Pants sought to speculatively explore the intersections of everyday cyclists and climate change in a way that offered cyclists ways to both reflect on their entanglement within a changing climate as people who are exposed to the elements on a daily basis as well as imagine scenarios with climate change in the future and its impacts on their cycling practices. This project stems from my own personal experience as a cyclist riding during the past few forest-fire-smoke-filled summers in Seattle which made me wonder if the smoke was due to changes in climate and then wishing I had ways to tangibly understand my imbrication with climate change.

One of the main things my research exposed was that climate change is hard to feel. Due to its generational scale, climate change is difficult to perceive in everyday life or within the context of bike commuting. Even though cyclists had rich, sensorial and embodied understandings of climate and weather built from a history of practice bike commuting, they had a difficult time citing specific instances of climate change within their practices (even cyclists who had been commuting for 7, 11, or even 15 years). So, in order to make climate change tangible at the scale of everyday life, I created a ‘time-bending’ garment for cyclists to wear which I called the High Water Pants that enable future projections about sea-level rise to be experienced in the present moment, in situ, as cyclists ride and explore Seattle’s unique geography and topography.

High Water Pants Concept

The High Water Pants are named after the colloquial term for pants that end above the ankle, jokingly associated with a coming flood — a play on how the concept is tied to data about sea-level rise in the Puget Sound (Miller et al. 2018). The High Water Pants work by having pant legs which dynamically shorten in correspondence with areas in Seattle that will be acutely impacted by sea-level rise in the future to signal to the rider they are in a future impact zone. The following is a concept video showing the functioning of the High Water Pants.

The High Water Pants use NOAA’s Sea Level Rise Viewer and Seattle Public Utilities Sea Level Rise Map as references to define areas that will be impacted by sea-level rise in the future. As a cyclist rides into those areas while wearing the High Water Pants, the pants actuate in real-time using live GPS information. The pants use a GPS module to detect if the rider is within a preset area, defined through hand-crafted geofences. GPS readings are passed through a polygon detection algorithm run by an Adafruit Flora microcontroller which allows the pants to detect whether the rider is inside or outside of geofences. The current areas I have geofenced for my pilot study are around Golden Gardens and Elliot Bay Trail because these are popular cycling paths as well as areas that will be affected by sea-level rise. Currently, the pants can only handle one geofence at a time, but I am in the process of updating my code to keep track of multiple polygons at once in order to allow cyclists to more actively explore Seattle. I intend to add the mouth of the Duwamish and Alki Beach to the geofences cyclists can explore. Ultimately, it would be amazing to have a polygon detection algorithm that could interpret sea-level rise GIS data downloaded directly from NOAA.

Left to Right: Seattle Public Utilities Map without geofences showing areas vulnerable to Sea Level Rise, Areas where I have drawn Geofences so far

Left To Right: Soft Circuit with GPS Unit, Pants ‘shortening’ mechanism in the up position (the impact is more dramatic on the bike with bent knees)

Crafting the High Water Pants

After a period of ideation, I began fabricating the High Water Pants. My goal was to have a physical prototype, something as close to a research product (Wakkary et al, 2015) as possible, or something durable that could be deployed into the field for longer-term use and testing with users.

1 — Getting Started

I started by making an ‘analog’ pair of pants that somewhat-faithfully followed one of my original sketches from my ideation phase, as well as beginning to work with servo motors on pants in conjunction with different fabric construction and embellishment methods (smocking and beads).

One of my favorite sketches from my ideation phase was an idea that utilized the texture of beads to simulate the feeling of water. In this sketch, a fabric inner-sheath would move up the leg to expose the cool, sloshing texture of beads. The GIF is an interpretation of that drawing moving through the leg-movement cycle of a cyclist to flesh out the idea and imagine what parts of the design would be complicated by movement. Finally, I built the pants in order to be able to use and test the concept in an analog way. I attached two strings to the top of the blue, inner sheath and ran them out the top of the waist band in order to be able to pull the sheath up my leg as I rode and to test the mechanics of this idea and the feeling of beads on the outside of the leg (away from the bike chain).

These photos represent some of the thoughts I was having as I began to grapple with putting a servo motor on a pair of pants in motion. I was learning about the potential of a servo to pull, the shape of the servo and how it could best be attached to fabric, possible gear configurations to allow the servo to be on its side while spinning a spool oriented in a different direction, and exploring the difference in control and possibility between 360 and 180 degree servo motors. I was also exploring and fabric construction methods that would organize the fabric into an even, controlled pulling system using smocking and ribbing, as well as doing experiments to try to create more organized bead structures.

Simultaneously, I was also conducting some low-fidelity feeling prototypes to begin to understand the capacity of my leg to feel as it was in motion on a bike.

two of the low-fidelity experiment prototypes I ran — on the left, I was trying to understand how beads swung in relation to a peddling, and on the right, I was recreating an experiment I did while out on a bike ride where I sewed a string to the inside of my pant cuff and ran it up the inside of my pants and pulled to see what a shortening pant leg would feel like.

Insights
The main insights I gained from these first experiments had to do with the mechanics, ergonomic and sensorial possibilities and constraints of the pants.

• The lower leg doesn’t have a fine sense of feeling so the pants feeling would be best as a binary, not graduated, experience.
• Making a system that pulled through the knee joint (or, mounting a motor above the knee joint) would add fluctuating stress to the motor due to the changing angle of the knee and would also cause drag through that bend, so I decided to try to create a system that operated under the knee joint.
• 180-degree servo motors are easy to control than 360-degree servos. Additionally, they require little energy and few pins on a microcontroller which is good for longer-term usage.
• Servos can’t pull very far, so the design would have to extend their reach or leverage their mechanical movement.

2 — Mechanical Ideation

After deciding to move the mechanical part of the pants to below the knee and deciding I would need a way to extend the impact of the servo’s arm, I set out to create a simpler way to ideate the mechanism by which I would raise the pants. To do this I created a model/frame based on my own leg to quickly ideate over.

I laser cut this ‘fake leg’ which I used to ideate quickly through mechanical pulling systems.

I created (sometimes with input from mechanical engineer friends) three different methods for pulling the pants using this fake leg: a hoop, a platform, a spool. I also created three other mechanisms: flipping over a piece of fabric, soft electromagnets, and a spring-loaded bead tautening system.

Spool Pull: This design seemed promising, but I quickly discovered that pulling without enough structure resulted in the spool mechanism nodding downwards under pressure, and spools are also unreliable in that the string can come off of them easily.

Platform Pull: Using a platform to mount the servo that is easily sewn into the pants fabric. The platform allows the servo to pull against itself to avoid awkward buckling of fabric.

Hoop Pull: A way of organizing all strings into an even pull all around the leg. However, it would probably bump against the bike frame and would require a DC or stepper motor with a spool, which would add a lot of complexity to the design.

Flip Texture: Attaching a panel of thick fabric to the servo arm with beads on one side and nothing on the other, the panel would flip in ‘impact zones’ to create watery, cold textures against the leg. I would have liked to make multiple panels which would have required multiple of servo motors per leg and adding weight and clunky-ness to the design.

Spring Bead-Tautening Mechanism: Drawing inspiration from a pen’s spring mechanism, we (me and my mechanical engineer friend, Maxx Yamasaki) imagined the possibility of tightening and loosening a system of beads dynamically.

Soft Electromagnetic Velcro: Inspired by the Koba Kant electromagnetic velcro concept I tested the potential of soft electromagnets to shorten the High Water Pants. Sadly, the electromagnets required too much electricity to make them a viable option for the pants.

3 — First Draft

In order to uncover complexity in creating a set of pants, I built a pair of pants in their entirety to test not only the mechanism but the code as well. I decided to try the platform side-pull method first and see how it went. I started with a pair of pants I found at Goodwill which had the basic shape I wanted to use, being wide legged but cropped. This was the first time I really tested the full, mechanized pants while riding as well.

Findings from the first whole pants:

• The platform pull method when on the side of the leg was a great way to pull up on the bottom of the pants.
• Conductive thread wasn’t conductive enough to deliver power evenly to my servo motors so I used wire in my design instead.
• The GPS geofence worked, but I needed to solve for computational interference between the running the servo and reading the GPS.

4 — Material Exploration

I was aware I needed to refine the materials of the pants and the materials of the pulling mechanism. To do this, I created ‘material sketches’ and then more refined, analog material prototypes. To refine the pulling mechanisms I iterated on the form and materials of the platform-pull device.

Material Sketches — laying material in ways I thought would work mechanically, but also aesthetically and then taking a photograph to document my ideas.

medium-fidelity pull-mechanism tests

increasing fidelity of the final arm design for the platform pull mechanism

5 — The Pants Design

I then began construction of the actual pants I would use. I started by making a muslin mockup, developing pocket pattern pieces and then moving to the yellow/mesh fabric.

To test the initial pants concept, shape, look and feel, I created a muslin mockup of these pants and designed the pattern piece for the external pocket which, at first, was just a simple square pocket, but which I extended to run across the entire front of the leg to give the pants a more technical look and feel like a utility pant or a Carhartt pant with external reinforcing.

Buttonholes were used to pass the servo holder through to the right side of the fabric as well as pass wires to the underside of the pants. I used very loose couch stitching to secure the wire to the seam running on the outside edge of the pants.

Sketch of some elements of the pants: (1) pocket and soft circuit, (2) red shows wire path couch stitched into seam of pants, (3) elastic waist for many sized riders (4) wide leg for many sized riders (5) servo attachment.

Final Pants showing the arm in the up position and the microcontroller out of the pocket.

6 — Computational System

While I was working iteratively on the mechanical parts of the pants, I was also working on the computational aspects of the pants. There were considerations and iterations in both the hardware and code I used to run the High Water Pants.

One of the main requirements of the High Water Pants was that they understood where they were geographically in order to raise and lower within certain zones. To accomplish this, I used a Flora Wearable Ultimate GPS Module in combination with a Flora microcontroller to create a GPS geofencing system. The GPS module could track where a rider is at all times. That location is then sent through an algorithm in the microcontroller that can detect whether or not the rider is inside or outside of a polygon which it builds through a collection of latitude and longitude points held in arrays. This can all happen as a cyclist rides so they can experience the data in real-time and actual, physical locations.

To create the geofences, I used the My Maps feature of google maps to create a set of points that would create a rough geofence that matched NOAA maps for sea-level rise in the same area. From these points, I would collect the latitude and longitude in a google docs spreadsheet and then manually load them into arrays. In order to create a more robust system, I will soon be creating code that accepts multiple polygons, so I can have more areas in Seattle connected to my pants. The areas I currently have geofenced are Golden Gardens and Elliot Bay Trail and the Olympic Sculpture Park. In future iterations, I would like to include more geofences in order to run a different type of testing with the High Water Pants. Currently, since I only have one area geofenced at a time, I have to tell the cyclist participants where to ride and then they know what to expect. If the test was more open-ended with more geographic locations and they could explore over multiple days, their exploration would be more self-guided and full of surprise and discovery.

7 — Major Insights

• Creating a clear feeling requires clarity of craft I didn’t achieve a clear feeling until the craft of my pants was clarified and refined as well. Feeling differences on different parts of the body require different design techniques, the leg requires a pretty obvious change. As do parts of the body while in motion.
• Depending on what part of the body you want to experience change, different design considerations would have to come into play. While the neck could detect a feather, the shin (in motion on a bike) needs more gross-motor movements.
• The feeling needed to be able to blend in and out of consciousness — I needed to craft the right level of ‘feeling’. If a cyclist is riding along the waterfront and it takes like 20 minutes, I don’t want to hit them with a servo for 20 minutes.

Next Steps . . .

Check-in for an account of the High Water Pants user testing pilot and discussion of the implications! :)

References

Miller, Ian et al. 2018. Projected Sea Level Rise for Washington State — A 2018 Assessment.

Wakkary, Ron et al. 2015. “Material Speculation: Actual Artifacts for Critical Inquiry.” Aarhus Series on Human Centered Computing 1(1): 12. https://tidsskrift.dk/ashcc/article/view/21299.