Blogging in motion

Wearable technology designers Diana Eng & Emily Albinski co-founded Black Box Nation, a fashion technology company, where they created their Blogging in Motion project during a Yahoo! hack day back in 2006. The purse has an integrated GPS and a camera that is connected to a basic stamp. It measures your movement by steps. Every 20 or so steps triggers the camera to snap a photo, which it then sends to a blog automatically via your cell phone that you presumably have clipped into the hardware.

What's interesting about this project is the idea of wearable technology communicating with online sources such as social networking sites and blogs. Imagine being able to keep up with all of your social networking sites through passive and natural gestures.

More info on the project's team via Black Box Nation.

Making sound from soft coils

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Designers Vincent Leclerc, Joanna Berzowska, and XS labs created the Accouphene Tuxedo, which emits a sonic environment through gestures. The jacket is decorated with 13 soft speakers that are embroidered on the jacket in the shape of a coil and a magnet is placed in the center. The yarn used is highly conductive so when it receives an electrical charge, it acts as a soft flexible speaker that emits a small sound. The sound is created when the wearer moves the sleeve across it or if the coils are bent through the flexing of the fabric.

What I find interesting about this project is that the designers were able to replace traditional rigid and unwashable audio components with soft and sewable materials that are used both functionally and aesthetically.

See it in action via youtube.

Voice pattern knitting

Magdalena Kohler and Hanna Wiesener are exploring the intersection between communication and fashion through their voice knitting collection TRIKOTON. The garments visualize the human voice in a dot-matrix-type knitted pattern creating a new aesthetics of speech pattern that is directly integrated into the textile of the garment. To generate the pattern, Kohler and Wiesener hacked a 1970s mechanical machine to make it interactive and produce the patterns. Here's how they describe how it works:

"The scheme of pattern cards of old, mechanical knitting machines was used for an audio data program, realised in processing. Now the frequency band of a spoken message is converted into a binary code for knitting patterns. [W]e used 4 microcontroller and 24 small engines in order to imitate a pattern card that could be directly controlled by the voice signals via a computer."

I would love to get my hands on one of these. More info about this project at trikoton.com.

Light as texture

Fashion designer Hamish Morrow is exploring light as pattern and texture. Video is projected onto an all-white dress that creates this gorgeous illuminating pattern that changes and animates.

The dress is completely impractical, but it demonstrates the effect that a dynamically changing pattern can have on the mood, historical connotations, and emotion associated with the garment.

More on Morrow here.

Light as body ornamentation

Designer Kyeok Kim’s is exploring new forms of generating body ornamentation including objects that leave decorative imprints on the skin, jewelry that prints decorative traces on the skin, and stringy textures that create ornamental silhouettes.

One of his recent explorations includes a collection of jewelry that projects patterns onto the wearer's skin called Aurora. Here's how Kim describes it: "‘Aurora’ creates patterns of light on the body as ornamentation, extending the ornamented space around the body and restyling its decorative silhouette by motion. ‘Aurora’ highlights the relationship between different pieces of jewellery, by its nature the pieces interact with the another. To operate the decorative light, one must gently move the ring (containing a magnet) towards the main jewellery piece."

Joanna Berzowska writes a paper on electronic textiles

Wearable technology designer and researcher Joanna Berzowska wrote a paper that is a great introduction to smart textiles titled Electronic Textiles: Wearable Computers, Reactive Fashion, and Soft Computation (pdf).

Abstract  "Electronic textiles, also referred to as smart fabrics, are quite fashionable right now. Their close relationship with the field of computer wearables gives us many diverging research directions and possible definitions. On one end of the spectrum, there are pragmatic applications such as military research into interactive camouflage or textiles that can heal wounded soldiers. On the other end of the spectrum, work is being done by artists and designers in the area of reactive clothes: 'second skins' that can adapt to the environment and to the individual. Fashion, health, and telecommunication industries are also pursuing the vision of clothing that can express aspects of people’s personalities, needs, and desires or augment social dynamics through the use and display of aggregate social information."

Read the full pdf here. More papers by XLabs here.