Spring 2025 Critical Making Showcase Brings Wearables to Life

The Berkeley Center for New Media’s Spring 2025 Critical Making course (NWMEDIA 203), taught by Professor Eric Paulos and TA Hila Mor, culminated in an inspiring public showcase held on May 8 at Jacobs Hall. This semester’s final provocation, titled Fashioning Fashionables, challenged students to reimagine wearable technology.

Over the course of the semester, students in NWMEDIA 203 pushed the boundaries of human-centered design and embodied computing through a series of provocations that spanned activism, movement, and emotion. The final showcase featured a stunning array of student projects that brought theory into practice through innovative, interactive prototypes.

Highlights from the Fashioning Fashionables Showcase

• Tether Feather: a kinetic, feathered skirt that encourages social interaction through movement powered by servomotors and touch sensors, designed to empower wearers with social anxiety.
• AdWalk: a futuristic ad-projection wearable that gamifies marketing, allowing users to earn money from real-time engagement with passersby.
• TouchBase: a haptic installation that simulates human touch, transforming anonymity into emotional vulnerability and fostering spontaneous connection in public spaces.
• Heart on Your Sleeve: a quietly glowing 3D-printed heart embedded in a jacket sleeve, visualizing internal emotion through biometric feedback.
• Note to Self: a bracelet that transforms movement into personal soundtracks, archiving lived experience through rhythm and color-coded music journaling.

These projects exemplify Critical Making’s mission: merging critical theory, new media, and hands-on prototyping to reimagine how we relate to the objects—and people—around us. Congratulations to all the students for another unforgettable year of radical creativity and technical experimentation! Check out current and previous offerings here.