LOGO HERE “This is more than a singular design or just a line of handbags, Aura is a lifestyle, a way of movement throughout the day... an interactivity encompassing what fashion tries to engage. These handbags represent a new form of thought, user development and intrigue, creating a personal experience for each and every identified user.�
Megan Houlihan + Samantha Svedlund
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BOLD. ALLURING. ENIGMATIC. BEAUTIFUL. DARING.
Daily Activities
Social Lifestyle
Personal Style
Utilizing a moodboard is imperative in fashion design and is often indicative of the feeling and expression emoted through the piece. We honed in on the irony of solar power, sunlight and current energy-centered designs. Instead, we developed a new thought process, and opened our eyes to conceptualizing through opposition. This board iterates the mood, form, tone and feeling of our design.
In order to further understand “our girl” we went inside her handbag. We pulled all of the possible necessities that a freelance industrial designer living in NYC would need to carry with her day-to-day. We maximized the size capacities of each item and employed these dimensions within our final orthographic patterns. The essential needs of “our girl” resides in her planner/notebook, headphones, makeup carry-all, phone, keys, and wallet.
COLOR
STYLE
Our color story was a simple choice after gaining inspiration from studying “our girl’s” lifestyle and harnessing the energy of our moodboard. Opposition and irony were two words that we wanted our design story to remain influenced by. Typical solar designs may employ yellow, orange, or white. However we decided to embody a different form of the sun, a solar eclipse.
‘Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.’ - Coco Chanel ‘Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.’ – Rachel Zoe
TREND Current trends should never dictate the decisions of a good designer, instead they should influence them to go further, get ahead of the curve and stay there. We researched current fall and spring trends, but only allowed them to push us above our resting design ideas and engage our minds to think of bigger, better, and more beautiful designs.
This flexible solar panel is made of silicone and rubber, allowing it to bend and curve. However, the thickness and materiality of this solar panel type is not condusive with the design of a handbag.
Solar Cell Beads are a new research venture in wearable energy started in China. Although these beads are very small, and can be woven into fabric, they are not a very attractive textile to work with in high fashion.
MIT’s cutting edge technology in printable fabric and paper solar cells is not yet available to the public. The efficiency of the cells needs to be improved upon, but the concept works the best with high-end fashion design.
Solar panels are currently being used at a large scale on backpacks and other types of bags. The intrusion of these panels breaks up the design and draws the eye’s attention.
Woven Polymer Electrode solar cells are another future possibilityin the wearable energy design field. However, the materials that the cells are woven into are currently limited and the efficiency is unknown.
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The Aura handbag design in-takes solar energy from the sun’s rays throughsolar cells printed on the exterior fabric of the bag, and stores the energy in an external battery. The external battery then hooks up to your cell phones charger and charges your phone on-the-go while remaining in your handbag. However, this battery can be removed from the handbag pocket, and charged on a local energy source, such as a wall socket. So when the sun is away, your phone can still play.
As soon as we had nailed down the style, mood and color story of our design, along with the type of solar technology we wanted to use, we realized that a textile designer was necessary to complete our design. The printed solar cell technology gave us the freedom and ability to create a pattern unique to our handbag design. We conveyed to our textile designer the process and inspiration behind our handbag and allowed her to freely interpret what our design meant in the language of textiles. She returned to us with five versions of a pattern that we felt were perfectly indicative the mood we wanted to create.
IMAGE OF FABRIC AND FINISHING SAMPLES BOARD GOES HERE
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HANDBAG
CLUTCH
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HANDBAG
CLUTCH
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