TreeHugger is covering the INDEX awards, celebrating the idea of “Design to Improve Life”. This post covers one of the 46 finalists chosen from 1,123 entries.
I am fascinated by the Wristify, a bracelet that makes you feel cool or warm. It is described on its INDEX page:
Wristify/Screen capture
They explain how it works on their website:
To go totally over the edge on this, Wired titles their story: MIT wristband could make AC obsolete.
Now this is a subject dear to my heart at TreeHugger, as I have spent a lot of time trying to understand the issues of comfort recently, as noted in my post Should we be building like Grandma’s house or like Passive House? I have been learning from Engineer Robert Bean’s amazing website, which teaches that thermal comfort is a state of mind.
Like the designers of the Wristify, Bean notes that it’s all in your head, in your Hypothalamus to be precise. However he also notes that it is connected to “something like 165,000 (+/- a few thousand) thermal sensors in your skin. For impact consider that the average human has a skin area of approximately 16 ft2 (1.5m2) to 20 ft2 (1.9m2) or about the hood area of a small to mid-size car.” The Wristify it trying to fool a very small subset of this giant organ.
© Comfort zone chart Victor Olyay
Also, Robert Bean, Allison Bailles and Victor Olgyay have all taught that there is a lot more to comfort than just temperature, there are also air speed, mean radiant temperature, humidity, clothing, metabolic rate and more.
Yes, the wrist is a sensitive point. But can “sending cooling or warming waves to the thermoreceptors on the surface of the skin”- a limited area of the skin on the wrist- really make a difference?
I have been skeptical of INDEX entries before and have been wrong. (Like I was about 2013 winner Freshpaper) And I see all kinds of people in the videos oohing and ahhhing and saying it works. But once again I am skeptical; I hope I am wrong again.
