Walking in the City: at night

Sarah and i are looking at walking in the city from the viewpoint of protection. We are interested in protecting the walker from certain dangers and also enhancing their sense of empowerment through natural bodily energies. These natural bodily energies will be enhanced and through use of natural energy sources that dwell within natural objects and substances.

Our brainstorming exercise was very useful with many interesting ideas being produced. We eventually grouped ideas and arranged them as seen below:

We then chose certain important ideas and moved them together creating the beginnings of a mind map:
Finally we neatened ideas from here up and moved them onto a final mind map to work from:


The design ideas we derived from this brainstorming activity were:

Light sourced being reflected off the body
Crystals placed on the garment serving as a protective source and also empowers walker- providing a sense of security and comfort
Reflected light could link to heart monitor- release an alert signal if heart rate rises to an alarming level- ie. if walker is afraid or in some kind of peril, lights emit this sense of anguish to others

Summary:
I am interested in persuing these ideas in order to make a wearable for a walker at night. However I feel it needs to be a bit more conceptually grounded and perhaps challenge some pre concieved ideas about walking. I am interested in pursuing the idea of protective natural energies surrounding the walker and capturing them to enhance the walker's experience of the journey. Ie. to capture the few positive and natural energies pulsating through the city and block out the overwhelming negative energies of the industrial dark city scape.