Jewelry as our home base

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.

Slippers explore alternative input

Hannah Perner-Wilson is exploring alternative sources of input through wearable suits and footwear. Her latest project, Joy Slippers, plays a soundscape that you control through your foot movements. "These slippers are designed with two pressure sensors embedded in each sole and can sense the weight being shifted between the toe and heel of each foot. This information is fed into a computer where a drawing application translates this analog input into drawing directions, so that the wearer of the Joy Slippers can draw with their feet in an etch-a-sketch fashion." Here's a video of it in action:

Check out more photos on her flickr set.

Luminescent raincoat

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.

Whispering dirty little secrets

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.

Soft switch sculptures

Artist and sculptor Claes Oldenburg is probably best known for his public art installations that play with very large scale objects. Another theme in his work is the idea of "soft" that he applies in unexpected ways to everyday, ubiquitous objects. With this piece, Oldenburg takes ordinary light switches and applies an unexpected material that makes it feel soft and squishy. This particular piece makes me think of all the soft-switch explorations coming out of the DIY culture, where designers and tinkerers are investigating new ways to turn ordinary switches and sensors into soft and flexible mechanisms.

Talk to the hand...or ring

AnalogueAesthetics creates hand-crafted accessories inspired by all things mechanical, chemical and electrical. One of their products that can be purchased on Etsy is this gorgeous ring that includes an integrated microphone. What I like about this design is that the artist wasn't afraid to let aspects of the technology directly inform the aesthetics. In this case, the grated pattern found on old microphones creates the main aesthetic texture that is also functional. I'd love to see the gestures that people make recording audio from this device.

If you're looking to buy one, it looks like they're sold out. Contact the designer here and request a backorder! *drool*