Light Diffusion

10-30 min

Ages 8+

What Will You Learn?

Discover ways that diffusion can be used to enhance your circuits and fashion.

About This Adventure

Today, fashion designers are not limited to fabrics in their designs. Technology has become part of our story and is much more accessible. Young designers can use tech such as lights, sensors, and microcontrollers to tell their stories.

In this adventure, you will experience and experiment as we go through the MakeFashion Edu process to support campers as they:

learn – about the elements of fashion and circuits
design – a story and the wearable
construct – a fashion tech piece using recyclable materials and lights
exhibit – be seen! Our favorite medium is the runway.

You will be able to support your designers as they find their voices and tell their own stories through fashion pieces they create and share.

This adventure is divided into several sections, each with its own projects. The bolded project denotes the page you are on. The arrows mark the section you are in.

Storytelling with Fashion

>>> Using Circuits in Fashion <<<

Using Elements of Fashion Design

Design Challenges

Exhibiting Student Work

Adding Diffusion

When we think about Color, Line, Shape and Texture in relation to lights we need to consider diffusion. Diffusion means the scattering of light rays. For fashion, our young designers often refer to the states of diffusion as how glowy or pin pointy the light is. For different effects the LED might be covered with something like glue or fabric to get more diffusion or moving the LED further away from the covering will change it also.

For example, if you want to get the appearance of the night sky you may want each light to be a separate point to look like the stars, so not much diffusion is needed, but if you want the effect of a sunset you would need to diffuse the lights so there is a glowing effect.

Things to try and experiment.

Cover your battery/LED circuit with different fabrics or paper or plastics to see the different effects.

Change the distance between the coverings and the light.

Combine different coverings and distances.

What do you notice? Which materials diffuse better than others? Which effects would help you tell your story on the runway? Which of the elements of fashion design can be manipulated by diffusing the light?

On the Runway

See Diffusion on the runway! Where are the lights on this outfit, and how are they getting diffused?

Notice that the headpiece uses clear wires, have you seen wires like these before? They are fiber optic wires. If you have fishing string at home, test it out to see how it diffuses light?

The LEDs are being a material like gauze, that allows you to both see the lights below and fills the fabric with the same colors.

About MakeFashion

MakeFashion Edu is an international non-profit working to promote learning through fashion and tech. Through hosting workshops, reach-out and push-in activities, and larger events, MakeFashion Edu sees providing access for young designers to go to industry and project-based learning as one way to pull local communities together.

SteamHead makerspace is a network of people, spaces, and events who collaborate to improve equity in education as the path forward. We believe that by embracing design thinking and a maker-mindset, education can be more engaging and meaningful, and with that more effective in preparing students for success. Check their website for their courses.