The concept:

Shadow is erratic. It is flat and weightless, just a tiny light effect cast on every day object. Haruki Murakami wrote a story about a person whose shadow was stripped off his own body when he wanted to go to a fantasy world called "hard-boiled wonderland". The shadow actually is holding our past footprint and was engraving something on our beloved land for us. How can a shadow be weightless? We would like to weigh the weight of shadow to give people a new perspective of seeing their shadow by perceiving the weight of their shadow.

We want to weigh the shadow using something has a symbol of weight, which is round stones that as a unit for weighing things in the ancient times.

By stretching a cloth, we are actually defining a concave and convex space, which is soft and flexible. We want to use the stretch of cloth and some tiny sphere-like stones to make a erratic shadow. Its weight can be changed by the stretch of the cloth. If there is more force stretching the cloth, then more stones will come into the shadow and therefore, weighing the shadow’s weight.

The idea of the interaction process:

At the beginning, the balls are randomly distributed on the fabric. When the person approaches the device and the sensor senses the human body, the motors pull the fabric through a plurality of strips, so that the balls move and aggregate, presenting the shape s adult shadow. When the person leaves, the motor pull around the fabric with strips so that the balls are again randomly distributed on the fabric.

Fabric selection:

We tried a variety of fabrics with different elastic thicknesses.

Alternative shadow object selection:

1. Water

The weight of sawdust is too small and the fluidity on the fabric is poor, so we eliminated it.

2. Sawdust

The weight is right, and the fluidity on the fabric is good, but the diameter is too large, so we eliminated it.

3. Wood beads

Because the shape is flat, the fluidity is weaker than the wooden beads, but the size is moderate.

4. Glutinous rice

The fluidity of the water is very good, but the fabric is difficult to waterproof, so we eliminated it.

5. Black bean

The shape is close to the sphere, the fluidity is good, the size is suitable

Shadow shaping:

At first we tried to sag the fabric with our fingers, observed the movement of the ball, and then tried to sew several strips on the fabric to pull, but we found that our shape of the shadow is not perfect, so we laser cut the wood board to make a hollow shadow silhouette and fill the bulge with the paper in the part that is not hollowed out, and place it under the fabric. we continuous pulled strips and when it closed to the board, the ball will gather in the hollowed-out silhouette area.