Wearing Digital Bodies:
Designing and Experiencing Dress as Poly-Body Objects at the Intersection of the Physical and the Digital
2022
Research Publication
Design Workshop
Through an artistic design research approach, a three-day workshop with undergraduate fashion design students was conducted using three-dimensional body scanning, CAD-based garment design, and augmented reality projection. Rather than treating scanned bodies as fixed references, participants explored fragmented, merged, moving, and poly-bodied scans as materials for design. These alternative digital bodies informed two distinct design strategies: using body scans themselves as forms of digital dress, and using them as unconventional bodies on which digital textiles were draped.
When projected onto physical bodies through augmented reality (AR) technology, the resulting designs produced poly-body dress expressions. Participants described experiencing garments as clothing, body extensions, and architectural spaces. Dressing became less about covering a body and more about entering, inhabiting, or negotiating spatial relations between multiple bodies, physical and digital.
These embodied encounters disrupted traditional distinctions between inside and outside, garment and space. By foregrounding morphological difference, scale, and spatiality, the project demonstrates how digital and AR technologies can expand fashion design beyond pre-defined garment forms, suggesting that artistic explorations of digital bodies can contribute repositioning dress as a relational and experiential practice shaped by bodies in continuous transformation.
Author: Jan Tepe
