The Law, Culture, and Economics of Fashion

Fashion is one of the world's most important creative industries. As the most immediate visible marker of self-presentation, fashion creates vocabularies for self-expression that relate individuals to society. Despite being the core of fashion and legally protected in Europe, fashion design lacks protection against copying under U.S. intellectual property law. This Article frames the debate over whether to provide protection to fashion design within a reflection on the cultural dynamics of innovation as a social practice. The desire to be in fashion - most visibly manifested in the practice of dress - captures a significant aspect of social life, characterized by both the pull of continuity with others and the push of innovation toward the new. We explain what is at stake economically and culturally in providing legal protection for original designs, and why a protection against close copies only is the proper way to proceed. We offer a model of fashion consumption and production that emphasizes the complementary roles of individual differentiation and shared participation in trends. Our analysis reveals that the current legal regime, which protects trademarks but not fashion designs from copying, distorts innovation in fashion away from this expressive aspect and toward status and luxury aspects. The dynamics of fashion lend insight into dynamics of innovation more broadly, in areas where consumption is also expressive. We emphasize that the line between close copying and remixing represents an often underappreciated but promising direction for intellectual property today. Published in Stanford Law Review, Vol. 61, March 2009.

The Descriptive Challenges of Fiber Art

published or submitted for publicatio

Adaptive and learning-based formation control of swarm robots

Autonomous aerial and wheeled mobile robots play a major role in tasks such as search and rescue, transportation, monitoring, and inspection. However, these operations are faced with a few open challenges including robust autonomy, and adaptive coordination based on the environment and operating conditions, particularly in swarm robots with limited communication and perception capabilities. Furthermore, the computational complexity increases exponentially with the number of robots in the swarm. This thesis examines two different aspects of the formation control problem. On the one hand, we investigate how formation could be performed by swarm robots with limited communication and perception (e.g., Crazyflie nano quadrotor). On the other hand, we explore human-swarm interaction (HSI) and different shared-control mechanisms between human and swarm robots (e.g., BristleBot) for artistic creation. In particular, we combine bio-inspired (i.e., flocking, foraging) techniques with learning-based control strategies (using artificial neural networks) for adaptive control of multi- robots. We first review how learning-based control and networked dynamical systems can be used to assign distributed and decentralized policies to individual robots such that the desired formation emerges from their collective behavior. We proceed by presenting a novel flocking control for UAV swarm using deep reinforcement learning. We formulate the flocking formation problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and consider a leader-follower configuration, where consensus among all UAVs is used to train a shared control policy, and each UAV performs actions based on the local information it collects. In addition, to avoid collision among UAVs and guarantee flocking and navigation, a reward function is added with the global flocking maintenance, mutual reward, and a collision penalty. We adapt deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) with centralized training and decentralized execution to obtain the flocking control policy using actor-critic networks and a global state space matrix. In the context of swarm robotics in arts, we investigate how the formation paradigm can serve as an interaction modality for artists to aesthetically utilize swarms. In particular, we explore particle swarm optimization (PSO) and random walk to control the communication between a team of robots with swarming behavior for musical creation

Archive

Growing up in a home with many objects from the past, I began to take an interest in my family\u27s past, first speaking with my parents and grandparents, and then exploring as many old family photographs as I could. I saw many familiar faces at different points in time, and learned the names of those I had never seen before, realizing they too, were family. I was also struck by the mystery these photographs represented. They were products of another era, an older technology. As such, time had visibly acted upon them. The images themselves had become vague, abstracted by time and difficult to recognize. Time has had a similar effect on the people and connections the photographs represented. Being a sculptor, I want to draw upon this experience and create a body of sculpture that explores my interest in family history and identity. I want to create sculptures that are expressive through their formal qualities. They will depict the passage of time and the way it affects and alters our connection to the past. In constructing these sculptures, I will utilize a variety of ceramic processes and glazing and firing techniques. For myself, the work is personal, but it also contains an element of the universal. There will be aspects of the sculptures that the viewers should relate to, drawing upon their own experiences with family, even if those experiences are not identical

Advancing performability in playable media : a simulation-based interface as a dynamic score

When designing playable media with non-game orientation, alternative play scenarios to gameplay scenarios must be accompanied by alternative mechanics to game mechanics. Problems of designing playable media with non-game orientation are stated as the problems of designing a platform for creative explorations and creative expressions. For such design problems, two requirements are articulated: 1) play state transitions must be dynamic in non-trivial ways in order to achieve a significant level of engagement, and 2) pathways for players’ experience from exploration to expression must be provided. The transformative pathway from creative exploration to creative expression is analogous to pathways for game players’ skill acquisition in gameplay. The paper first describes a concept of simulation-based interface, and then binds that concept with the concept of dynamic score. The former partially accounts for the first requirement, the latter the second requirement. The paper describes the prototype and realization of the two concepts’ binding. “Score” is here defined as a representation of cue organization through a transmodal abstraction. A simulation based interface is presented with swarm mechanics and its function as a dynamic score is demonstrated with an interactive musical composition and performance

Utilities of Fiction: Inside and Outside of the Brain in 'The Flocking Party'

“Utilities of Fiction” discusses the science fiction project, “The Flocking Party”, an online, multimedia story that is set in the future. “The Flocking Party” is a creative research project that activates the fertile territory between cognitive evolution, media theory, creative research, and science fiction. The four distinct chapters or “fictions” presented here provide diverse interpretations of the project. This network of interpretation is traced with biological and environmental metaphors for understanding how representation functions in and outside of the brain. A tour of neural structures is correlated to the effectiveness of stories and new media for building new perceptions. Concluding the tour is a proposal for mind-like media that produce more useful representations. The four chapters, Convenient Fiction, Environmental Fiction, Science Fiction, and Perceptual Fiction elucidate the motivation, conception, process, and distribution of “The Flocking Party”. Combined, these chapters form a set of associations and intersections that provide a map for exploring the project's creative utilities.Master of Fine Arts (MFA)Art and DesignUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/41238/2/The_Flocking_Party.ziphttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/41238/3/UtilitiesOfFiction.pd