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June 13, 2007, 03:50 PM ET
Wearable Code
The T-shirts and tote bag that Julia R. Vallera created as part of her course work at Parsons the New School for Design hold an open secret.
What appears to be merely a cool design is actually a diary entry, locked within a special barcode that can be read by a cellphone.
The code presents “my private thoughts and writing, kind of exposed in a really public way, but contradictorily, being still private because its encoded,” Ms. Vallera said in an interview.
Ms. Vallera, a part-time master’s-degree student and course instructor, created the T-shirts while enrolled in “Me and My Mobile.” Students walk into the course with a mobile phone, but they leave it with what the instructor, Paul Notzold, calls “the Swiss Army knife of media.”
Cellular-phone technology is exploding in Asia, particularly China and Japan, so American designers are looking East, Ms. Vallera says. The city of New York also inspired her. “I wanted this interaction between people where you could secretly take a picture of this code and find something out about this person without them even knowing about it,” she said. “Being in New York, I feel that people are so isolated and directed in their daily activities that they miss that kind of interaction.”
You can order a T-shirt that encodes your own diary entry on Ms. Vallera’s Web site. —Sierra Millman
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