I instantly fell in love with this project by Jordy Rooijakkers (TU/e Industrial Design) for Philips Lumiblade Creative Lab, which is a Growing Light that responds to touch. Caress the light or tap it gently and it reacts by subtly transforming into a new illuminating form.

In the wearable tech field, designers have been exploring this type of physical transformational behavior in garments. A few include the following. However, I have yet to see any explorations that incorporate movement AND light in this way.

• Ying Gao’s Walking City garments that respond to movement, wind and touch
• Hussein Chalayan’s shape-shifting runway collections
• Jae Kim’s experiments with kinetic and mechanical garments

More info at Behance.net
Images from Behance.net

GER: mood sweater The GER: Galvanic Extimacy Responder, mood sweater is an emotive display that is an externalized intimacy.

InflataCorset is a heart rate sensor-initiated inflatable corset. When the heartbeat reaches an excited, panic state, a wireless heart rate sensor triggers the air pump. Then, the corset inflates. The external pressure of the vest on the skin calms the nervous system and returns the heart back to a resting rate

FURVER fo.corset is an interactive hard shell corset with “emotionally volatile” fur that reacts to the proximity of those too near. Inspired by sea anemones, animated tentacles rise and bio-luminescent color intensifies to warn predators of personal space dimensions being invaded as well as protect the wearer.

Continue reading on Sensoree.
Images from Sensoree.

I’m currently at #sxsw interactive in Austin soaking in all the ideas, conversations and people. I was pleasantly surprised when R/GA‘s Will Turnage stood up in his talk with Chloe Gottlieb titled The Refrigerator Speaks: The Secret Language of Things to show off his awesomely smart “rocker” garment. To make a point about hacking into #smartthings, he created a smart shirt equipped with a Lilypad, Bluetooth, and lights that could be controlled by your cell phone. Punch in some commands and the lights would illuminate. He even added gestures. Tilt the phone right and the right side of the shirt would light up. Tilt left, and the left would light up. He then explained how he used Twitter’s APIs to allow for the audience to tweet commands. Through the rest of the presentation, his shirt would light up as people tweeted about the presentation.

Turnage does a great job demonstrating how, as designers, we can take objects and services, augment them and combine them in interesting ways to create new and meaningful experiences. What are other ways to do this?

Check out this book they recommend referenced during their talk: Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design by Mike Kuniavsky.

Get a summary my sxsw visit so far on the Artefact blog.

German-born IT consultant and designer Marc Mann has created a line of gorgeous illuminating jewelry. According to the Hilde Leiss Gallery, ”Exotic deep-sea creatures, early kaleidoscopes and gothic cathredal windows served as the inspirational source for the jeweLight collection.”

Mann hides small LEDs inside the glass material, which results in a soft glow that brings out the aesthetics of its natural texture and characteristics. For power, the designer discretely integrates small coin cell batteries into the clasp or a small tag that is attached to the piece.

Mouna Andraos, in collaboration with Sonali Sridhar, has designed Address Necklace, which “is a handmade electronic jewelry piece. When you first acquire the pendant, you select a place that you consider to be your anchor – where you were born, your home, or perhaps the place you long to be. Once the jewelry is initialized, every time you wear the piece it displays how many kilometers you are from that location.”

With our increasingly mobile and transient lives, the project helps to give a sense of home, or it helps us aspire to where we want to be. The necklace implementation is great since it allows you to take it will you everywhere no matter what you are wearing.

Multimedia designer and programmer Elise Co, designed Puddlejumper, a concept that brings light and color to our usually gray and rainy days. These dreary and dark days reflect our mood and the winter is the time of year when they’re the most prevalent (for those of us not lucky enough to live in the tropics). Elise decided to solve that problem by creating a luminescent raincoat that glows in the rain. She hand-silkscreened electroluminescent lamps on the front of the jacket, which are wired to water sensors on the back and sleeve. When water hits the sensor, the lights glow and flicker.

Elise created this project in 2004 and there have been some advancements in light-up textiles since then. If designed today, she may replace the EL technology with textile LEDs or Lumalive technology that is available on the market today.

Designer Addie Wagenknecht created this conceptual piece called Dirty Little Secrets during a wearable technology class in NYU’s ITP program. Wagenknecht is interested in the implications of communication that is not edited or hidden and the reaction of people in both public spaces and smaller intimate settings. As a result, she integrated audio circuitry that plays vocal tracks of her “dirty little secrets” such as lies, passwords, credit card numbers, and unspoken desires. And the garment reacts to how the user wears it by adjusting the volume of the audio.

There are a couple of interesting concepts that she’s investigating with this project. One is her interest in public vs. intimate spaces and the threshold of information in which people are willing to respond to. The other is the idea of using different positions of the garment on the body to cause a response. I’d love to see more examples of the gestures and their potential with this garment.

She documented her process here, which includes a video of the audio.

Designer Diana Eng created this heartbeat hoodie that captures moments of excitement throughout your day. It’s equipped with a heart rate sensor and a camera that snaps a photo whenever your heart rate increases. The photos automatically upload to a blog that you can refer to or share with your friends. According to Eng, it is intended as a form of involuntary blogging.

What I love about this project is that it uses wearable technology as a way to sense and capture both reactions with our bodies and the context of our surroundings. Designers should constantly explore how technology can enable or enhance those relationships. Heartbeat hoodie succeeds in merging body sensing, environmental context, and social communication into a simple and beautiful concept.

Designer Elena Corchero focuses on creating work that explores lost values through the combination of clothing and technology. “By evoking the beauty and melancholy of craft, her work challenges the aesthetics and function of smart fabrics emphasizing the emotional value of keepsakes and garments.” One of her many beautiful projects is WhisPiral, a gorgeous spiral-shaped shawl that carries whispers of your loved ones. It explores how technology can enhance the way garments and accessories evoke memories of these relationships.

The circuitry is integrated directly in the textile and allows your friends and loved ones to record short audio messages at different locations. These are then “whispered” back when you either wrap the shawl around you or if you caress a different area of the garment.

Philips design probe program has created a variety of projects under the theme SKIN. The concept behind these experimental garments is to investigate the expression of emotion and personality through reactive wearable technology. The futuristic garments ”show emotive technology and how the body and the near environment can use pattern and color change to interact and predict the emotional state” of the wearer. 

One of my favorite dresses is the gorgeous Bubelle Blush Dress, which uses biometric sensing technology that senses your emotions on its inner layer and projects them onto the outer layer. The result is a beautiful dress that illuminates light patterns within its textiles and reacts differently to every individual.

source via popgadget, we make money not art