Featured Blog Posts – March 2009 Archive (20)

Color-It-Yourself Dress

The result of a collaboration between a graphic designer, Michiel Schuurman, and a fashion designer, Berber Soepboer, the Color-In Dress is a DIY garment that can be hand-colored using markers. This playful ensemble was created for the textile factory "… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 31, 2009 at 11:40am — 3 Comments

Round-up of Interactive Fashion Tutorials

CRAFT Video: LilyPad Arduino 101 from make magazine on Vimeo.

There has been a lot of activity in the DIY interactive fashion arena and I gathered up a few tutorials to share.

First off, Becky Stern from Craft Magazine and Sternlab created a… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 30, 2009 at 11:26am — No Comments

Nitinol Experiments

There's been a bunch of activity and discussion around nitinol on this site. For all of you who are curious about nitinol, I want to share these wonderful nitionl experiments by Ted Ullrich. Ted is an interactive designer that creates mash-ups between the physical and digital world. For his master's work, he is experimenting with creating a variety of tangible and phyiscal computing devices. You can view some of… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 26, 2009 at 8:32pm — No Comments

Decorative Thermochromic Panel Experiments

Thermochromic Panel

Mark Meagher, an architect, researcher and PhD candidate based at the EPFL Media and Design Lab in Lausanne, Switzerland is experimenting with smart inks to create decorative and dynamic architectural panels.

Mark is interested in creating " temporal patterns as part of the experience of architecture, analogous to the way a… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 26, 2009 at 10:36am — No Comments

Photochromic Silicone Jewelry

Photochromic Rings

Photochromic Silicone Ring

Marian Sturkenboom is a jeweler who makes silicone-based accessories infused with photochromic and phosphorescent pigments. Her smart ink jewelery is part of her Sun and Moon collection and subtly changes color in sunlight or begins to glow when it becomes dark.

Sturkenboom's work reminds of me of bioluminescent jellyfish because of the… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 24, 2009 at 11:41pm — 1 Comment

Music Interface using Conductive Thread

Bret Renfer designed a novel interface to play back digital beats using ordinary buttons and conductive thread. It appears to work via capacitive sensing so when your finger touches the thread on the surface of the buttons, it plays a beat. The buttons in this case are just decorative. I do like the idea of using buttons as both mechanical closures as well as input devices. This could have an interesting… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 24, 2009 at 12:18am — 1 Comment

Futuristic Fashion for the Sporting Industry

According to Lacoste in 2083, tennis will go high tech. Not only will your shoes be smart, but so will your playground fully equipped with pressure sensitive walls. This future scenario takes place 75 years from now — my gut says it won't take that long. Enjoy the… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 22, 2009 at 11:53pm — No Comments

Woven & Embroidered Concrete

Girli Concrete is an R&D project for the Tactility Factory (a colloboration between Belford and Morrow) that fuses textiles with cement to create beautiful "soft" building surfaces. Traditional textile assembly techniques such as weaving and embroidery are used to create decorative textures on concrete panels.

Take a look at the images below. They are quite… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 20, 2009 at 2:44pm — 1 Comment

Book Review: Fashion Geek

Fashion Geek Cover

The repertoire of DIY books that fuse fashion and craft with technology is quickly growing and the latest, and much awaited addition, is Fashion Geek by Diana Eng.

Many of you might be familiar with Diana's geek… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 19, 2009 at 1:36pm — 1 Comment

Skin as the New Interface

Birthmark Tattoo

BirthmarkTattoo

I've stumbled upon a few interesting projects that use skin as an interface. The latest is Birthmarks Tattoo by Arjan Groot and Menno Wittebrood. The birthmark tattoos use Braille as a way of infusing skin with an abstract message.…

Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 18, 2009 at 12:43pm — No Comments

Fluid Sculpture + Clothing

I have been experimenting with clear plastic tubing as a "textile" material. Here are two prototypes I've been working on.

My goal is to take "complex" patterns, like the knitted sculpture in the first half of the video, and translate them into clothing. There is a very basic, unstylish skirt test in the video's second half that I made last year.

I had the idea years ago, but didn't feel compelled to do it until last year's Maker Faire in SF; I am… Continue

Added by Charlie Bucket on March 16, 2009 at 1:30pm — 5 Comments

Books printed with Smart Inks

The Egg Book

Since last week I posted about the Smart Materials Kit available via MakerShed, I thought I'd introduce you to two works by designer SAWA TANAKA that use smart inks to create interactive books.

Both Tanaka's… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 16, 2009 at 11:28am — No Comments

Smart Materials Kit

For a taste of smart materials to satisfy your "smart" crafting craving, the wonderful folks at Make put together a smart materials starter kit.

What you get:

• Fashioning Technology, by Syuzi Pakhchyan (a $29.99 value)

• ¼ oz Phosphorescent Powder (it glows in the dark!)

• 10g of Photochromic powder, Blue (it changes color in different lights)

• 10g of Photochromic powder, Yellow (it… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 13, 2009 at 1:52pm — 7 Comments

Solar-powered Interactive Fashion

Solar Dress

Element-ary by Tine Hertz

Power is an enormous problem when creating wearable technology. Two students, Tine Hertz and Maria Langberg from the Danish Design School tackled this issue head-on by developing a textile-based screenprinted solar panel that can be integrated directly into wearables.

Unplugged Textile Solar Cell

Unplugged Textile…

Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 12, 2009 at 3:00pm — 2 Comments

Haute-tech helmets by Lagerfeld

Lagerfeld helmet

Fashion and technology once again collide with Karl Lagerfeld's latest accessory: a luxe scooter helmet with

with built-in iPod capability. Debuting in his Paris show this past Sunday, Lagerfeld, who heads up the designer brands Chanel and Fendi, revealed a mink-covered helmet featuring full carbon fiber shells and ultra-soft burgundy nappa… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 10, 2009 at 4:51pm — No Comments

Cloud Umbrella

There is something so implicitly delightful about this umbrella concept by Joonsoo Kim, regardless of how impractical it may be. I love the use of a simple low tech pump system in the design intended to inflate the umbrella similar to how you would inflate a yoga ball.

Cloud Umbrella…

Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 10, 2009 at 10:19am — No Comments

Fashion and Technology on Make.TV

The wonderful folks from Make TV made this lovely artist's profile (featuring me) above. I believe it aired this weekend on PBS.

Enjoy!

As a side note, the Found Sound wearable prototype was created as an interaction study to examine various gestures that could be used in future wearables. By beginning with an abstract concept, it allowed me to create more playful gestures (i.e. touching of both wrists together) as means of controlling… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 9, 2009 at 9:30am — 1 Comment

New Lilypad Protoboard

Lilypad Protoboard

More Lilypad goodness from the folks at Sparkfun. The latest addition to the Lilypad e-textile tool kit is is the Lilypad Protoboard.

Lilypad Protoboard Back

Back of Lilypad Protoboard w/ all through holes connected

Unlike traditional protoboards, the… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 5, 2009 at 4:25pm — No Comments

Social Software meets Fashion: The Tweeting T

Twitter T-shirt

If you're interested in wearing your social network on your sleeve, read up on the following projects/products below that fuse social software and mobile technologies with interactive fashion.

First off, the folks at Squidder developed an interesting first prototype of an augmented reality Twitter feed T-shirt.

Using a barcode embedded with a Twitter username, the… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 4, 2009 at 4:00pm — 1 Comment

Photosensing Knit Safety Wearable

Using the Lilypad Arduino, youtube user lovelikerobots made this wonderfully warm knit collar that lights up and blinks once it gets dark. This is a great project to keep you nice and toasty, and, more importantly, visible at night while you are biking through the dark city streets.

A total of 14 LEDs were used, a Lilypad Arduino and a light sensor.

You can create your own… Continue

Added by Syuzi on March 3, 2009 at 9:25am — No Comments