Digital Fabrication Laser Cut

For this laser cut project I wanted to make something about me that is special, and I can wear this all the time. I think one of the special thing about me is that I have lived in many different countries since I was small.Therefore, for this project I wanted to collect data of how long I’ve stayed in each city since I was born.

Then I decided to use month as my data to make the data visualisation.

I was born in Beijing, and stayed in Beijing for the most of my life, then I moved to Warsaw, Poland, with my mom, since her job is there, after 3 years I moved to London with her, I stayed in London for two years, came back to Beijing for high school, and then when to Syracuse for my undergrad study, after graduate from Syracuse I moved to New York to work and study for my graduate degree. That is basically my journey, after collecting my data, I thought about how to visualise these data.Then I came up with the idea of making something wearable because I studied and worked as a fashion designer for so many years , and that is where my passion is.

Each color indicate a city

These five colors are my favorite colors. I used white to represent Beijing because here is where I was born , and I think white is the purest color in the world which can indicates the pureness of me when I was small. From light pink to dark blue I think is represents me from young gradually to mature.

I used Vectorworks to calculate the diameter of each circle, and exported to illustrator to create laser cut.

Testing laser cut on cardboard.

My data earring~ I used 300 paper circles to completed this earring, which indicates the 25 years of my life.

After I used all the circles for my earring, I found out I can also create some beautiful piece using these leftover papers .