Karla-Sofia Zapata-Garcia

          From my junior spring at MIT to my graduation, I was an undergraduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab. While at the Media Lab, I worked on the project Kino, living jewelry that can attach to clothing. We studied how to create dynamic fashion, and how to make wearables more approachable for users uncomfortable with technology. While Kino can purely be aesthetic, such as the pattern-changing example, it can also have more practical uses, such as climate reactive clothing or phone notification.

          In the year and a half I worked on this project, I assembled and tested robots, designed cases for the robots to appear more brooch-like, or jewelry-like, and created garments from various fabrics for application testing.

          For more on the project, visit the MIT Media Lab's website: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/kino-kinetic-wearable/overview/