What I failed to imagine when I wrote the article was the imaginative and powerful role that wearable tech can play in performative demonstrations.

In December 2009 at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, a handful of students from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) hit the streets dressed in remarkable wearable artifacts to protest climate change.

These "performative pioneers" used wearable design "in the context of climate, environment and sustainability." The wearables were developed as part of a two-week ‘Performative Design, Wearable Technology and Sustainability’ workshop lead by Daviid Gauthier, Di Mainstone and Priya Mani.

The result were projects that were evocative tools used to explore radical ideas for creating a sustainable future.

Dandelion (pictured above) investigated ideas of personal, mobile kinetic energy as a sustainable source for energy consumption.

Dandelion is a wearable kinetic sculpture created from miniature windmills that generate energy from movement and the wind. Small individual power generating circuits transfer the rotational energy of the spinning windmill into usable voltage.

In the prototype, the generated power was used to turn on LEDs, but the energy could be harnessed to power mobile devices or stored for later use.

I will be covering the rest of the projects this week (seen in the video above) so saty tuned!