anti
2021 NYC x design award winner
The Vision for Change
Anti is a wearable take on disaster resilience in which everyday garments serve as flexible body armor during times of unprecedented and unexpected danger.
Crafted from protective fabrics like Tyvek and Nomex, which are respectively antimicrobial and fire retardant, Anti contends that clothing can do much more than make a statement: clothing can save your life, or, at the very least, your body.
The steps
1 Product Vision Session
4 Garment Prototyping Sessions
The tools
Sewing Machine
Sewing Kit
Dress, pants, and jacket patterns
Dupont Tyvek
The driving insight
The inspiration for Anti comes from excerpts from William Langewiesche’s American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, which revealed that many of the bodies recovered from the September 11th Terrorist Attack on the Twin Towers were the bodies of firefighters which were protected by fire retardant jackets, whose outer linings are crafted from fire retardant fabric. On the contrary, the bodies that were never recovered from the site, because they were incinerated by the immense heat and pressure that were the cause and result of the falling towers, were the bodies of female office workers, whose delicate dresses and blouses offered zero protection in the moment of crisis. Anti is designed for them and their families, as much as it is for those of us who have not and may never experience such a tragedy.
Ultimately, Anti is designed for the families and friends of those who perish in the hypothetical disaster because the garments are intended to protect the body enough so that, once recovered, it can be returned to the family for proper blessing and burial. One of the hardest things to recall from those months following 9/11 was not the names of victims whose bodies were found lifeless, but the names of victims whose bodies were never found. It seems hard enough to lose a loved one, and even tougher to not have any means of physically mourning their passing. Anti is created to be the protector of last resort; in the event that the worst happens, there is hope that the wearer’s body could be returned to their family and friends so that they can have proper closure and begin the journey of healing.
how i grew
Anti was crafted almost purely from insights derived from secondary research at the inception of my graduate thesis exploration. Since this was one of my earliest artifacts, I was able to use Anti as a discussion topic during the qualitative interviews that constituted the bulk of my primary research. In one particular conversation with a research participant who was present during the 2020 Beirut Explosion, the importance of individual protection surfaced as she highlighted the fact that many non-life-threatening injuries she witnessed that day were caused by falling shards of glass. She loved the idea of clothing that could have protected her friends and family during such a sudden, disastrous event that occurred on what seemed to be an ordinary day.
Her comments on the value of this idea came as a surprise because it is a common mindset in the design and innovation spaces to distance oneself from the earliest insights and ideas that emerge in our work. Time and again I have read articles by renown designers warning of the dangers of falling in love with your earliest ideas because they are often the worst. For this reason, I had not previously placed a significant focus on those early insights, as I was focusing all of my attention on getting deeper into the research and identifying as many new insights as possible, all in an effort to get to “the right ones”.
Feedback from this participant served as watershed findings in my thesis work for many reasons, but the most important lesson I learned was that I should not completely discount my early ideas. While they may not be as well-informed as ideas that come later in the process, the early ideas have value in that they are the mind’s prototypes of solutions to come. Neither perfect nor complete, early ideas are often straightforward and that simplicity is valuable. Now, instead of assuming that early ideas or insights are probably not the best, I look at ways that they can be refined or combined with later ideas and insights to address the challenge at hand. When early findings or ideas persist even as more findings and ideas surface, I now embrace and explore them critically while knowing that “the right idea” or “the right insight” can appear at any phase of design.