By Lucija Šutej

Irmandy Wicaksono (born 1993) is a transdisciplinary engineer, artist, and designer pursuing his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wicaksono is part of the Responsive Environments Group and a Research and Teaching Assistant at the mentioned institution. He holds a B.Eng. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Southampton and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from ETH Zurich.

Wicaksono’s work has been covered in numerous magazines such as Forbes, Domus, FastCompany, and Wired Italia and presented in events such as Burning Man, Cambridge Science Festival, and the World Economic Forum. His work appeared in Springer Nature and was a member of the Google Arts and Culture Design Sprint in 2020. 

LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: You are researching transdisciplinary engineering via soft electronics embedded in textiles. What attracted you to textiles? 

IRMANDY WICAKSONO: I am an electrical engineer by training, and my undergraduate thesis focused on optimizing energy harvesting efficiency – from thermoelectric generators that convert heat into power. I have always been interested in technological innovations (laugh), but as a child, I was drawn to design – specifically in fashion and music tech. The electronic devices that marked my teenage years, such as iPods, always intrigued me and led to my focus on electronics. However, my interest in design remained. Following my undergraduate studies, I did an exciting internship with Studio XO, a fashion tech company in London. 

Studio XO was an interdisciplinary environment where I worked with industrial and fashion designers, making these incredible futuristic dresses. Their vision was to enable people to fly through dresses, and I was working on a couple of robotic dresses that involved the integration of electronics. 

Back then, the iTunes Festival was still a thing, and they would always invite different artists. During the festival (2013), Studio XO worked for Tech House, a division of the House of Gaga – a group that designs dresses for Lady Gaga. She loves bubbles, so the team tried to figure out how it works. We devised a 3D-printed dress, Anemome, with wireless bubble machine generators distributed everywhere in the clothing. I was involved in how to transport bubbles via liquid machine storage to the generator and had to synchronize the process of opening and closing the machine with timing. The liquid flows to the open module to a bubble film and is met with a fan system that spins and creates the bubble.