Professor Joanna Berzowska, a teacher at Concordia University in Montreal, has developed various items of clothing that incorporate technologies into the garment structure to stimulate interaction between the clothes, the wearer and the world.
Twenty1f has a great report on four of her new ideas including: musical clothes such as pants that make a sound every time you take a step, memory outfits that record acts of physical intimacy using a microphone and a series of light-emitting diodes stitched across the front, ’shape memory alloys’ integrated into dresses which can be programmed to have different shapes at different temperatures, and kinetic hemlines that go up and down on their own!
Professor Berzowska works as part of xs labs, whose website describes the prototypes in more detail-
"The
design of garments we wear usually integrates social, psychological,
and physical functions. Each garment presents a variable combination of
functionality, from the purely aesthetic to highly task-driven. With
these projects, instead of focusing on an application that might
increase our physical comfort or increase our productivity, we focus on
playful scenarios that develop a behavioral model for the garments
themselves and encourage a sense of wonder and delight.
The Kukkia dress is decorated with three animated flowers that frame
the neckline. Each flower opens and closes over a 15 second interval.
The flowers are constructed out of felt and silk petals that provide
relative rigidity and integrate stitiched Nitinol wire. When heated,
the wire shrinks and pulls the petals together, closing the flower. As
it cools down, the rigidity of the felt counteracts the shape of the
wire, allowing the flower to open.Vilkas is a dress
with a kinetic hemline on the right side that rises over a 30 second
interval to reveal the knee and lower thigh. It is constructed of heavy
hand-made felt with a very light yellow cotton element that contracts
through the use of hand-stitched Nitinol wires. Once heated, the
Nitinol easily pulls the cloth together, creating a wrinkling effect.
This movement is slowly countered by gravity and the weight of the
felt.
The hemline is programmed to rise
autonomously, not in response to any external or internal input. This
creates a kinetic dress whose behavior can be playful and even
desirable, but can also be embarrassing in the wrong social situation.
The wearer can wait for the hemline to fall, which can take several
minutes, or can actively pull it back down. This initiates a physical
conversation between the wearer and the garment, as they fight over
control of the bodyís real estate."
These and other ‘wearable technologies’ will be unveiled at reSkin workshop in Australia next January, and I for one will be watching intently. As technology pervades our daily lives it makes sense for clothing to be a main integrator. However, when so many companies are focussed on turning traditional garments into carriers of electronics that we already possess, it’s very interesting to see how some innovators are pushing the boundaries the other way and producing ideas that use technologies within clothing to respond to personal, social and cultural needs.
In the words of xs labs-
"The killer application for wearable computing is to convey personal identity information.
This is called fashion and it is mostly visual."
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
