Wearing Tech: Where Fashion Meets Technology
New ways to wear technology are affecting everything from the health care field to the halls of academia to the catwalk. Even fashion designers are getting into the wearable computing act.
CIO — Shirts that light up with LED ads. Textiles with embedded temperature sensors. Athletic gear that changes color to show the intensity of an athlete's workout. Technology is not just for your desktop anymore; it has the potential to infiltrate your closet.
Wearable technology is being used in sports and medical care to improve performance and help people lose weight. Fashion designers are incorporating tech elements into fabrics to give clothes a modern edge, and gamers are using wearable tech to enhance their gameplay. It's a cultural and technological time when the ubiquitous nature of tech means that people interested in the fusion between portable circuits and fashion can now wear what's "smart" and what computes. And with social networking technologies taking off in certain circles—generating a true look at me syndrome—wearable technology follows that fashion, along a means of self-expression, and picks up where computers, portable or otherwise, leave off.
Activities by researchers and clothing designers with wearable technologies show an active interest in the field.
One example of such interest is the 12th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, which will be held in Pittsburgh starting Sept. 28. Researchers, designers, manufacturers, fashionistas and others will convene to see new developments in wearable computers. Conference goers will see how wearable tech can help people learn to play piano more easily, for example. They'll also take a tour of BodyMedia, Inc., a company dedicated to producing gadgets that monitor such important health data as calories burned, dietary intake, and duration of sleep.
Other big name events include the San Francisco Exploratorium's 2nd Skin Exhibition, which ran April 25th to Sept. 7. Last winter, MIT and Boston's Museum of Science hosted "Seamless: Computational Couture" which showcased wearable technology created by designers from around the world, including a fashion show and interactive exhibit between the audience and wearables. One such project shown was the Charming Burka," which was able to send an image of the wearer's face (or any other body part) beneath the Burka to the audience, via Bluetooth.
Wearable technology is making its way into classes as well. MIT, along with Georgia Tech and University of South Australia, for example, offer courses where students spend time in research labs working on wearable computers, augmented reality and virtual reality.
Professor Lucy Dunne recently started teaching wearable technology and apparel design at the University of Minnesota's School of Design. "The wonderful thing about the position is that it's actually titled a 'wearable technology position.' That might be the first time I've ever seen that, so it's definitely new and definitely an exciting development," Dunne says.
Although it may seem so, wearable technologies are not new. In the 1880s, the first hearing aids were developed. A wearable computer was tested in 1961 at a Las Vegas casino, by Edward O. Thorp and Claude E. Shannon, who created a pocket-sized analog computer used for predicting roulette wheels." CuteCircuit made headlines in 2006 with its "Hug Shirt", in which sensors, set off by the heat of skin, touch and your heartbeat, "give a hug" to another person. And don't forget the pocket watch, which debuted in the 1500s, though wristwatches hit the mainstream when British soldiers wore them at the front in World War I.
"Expression is arguably the most important function of clothing today —and arguably one of the key reasons we wear clothes at all, historically speaking— and it seems natural that technology will eventually influence the ways in which we express ourselves and communicate through clothing," Dunne says.
It's hard to isolate the exact tipping point that's caused this recent uptick in interest in the field, but wearable technology, or "wearables," as insiders refer to the field, have caught the attention of many designers from the textile and engineering industries. Designer Moritz Waldemeyer suggests that designer Hussein Chalayan's collections shown in Paris during the past two years has something to do with it. Chalayan, one of the few internationally renowned fashion designers to incorporate technology into his creations—dresses that mechanically morph (one with a motorized rising and falling hemline), and and more recently, a few garments that emit light using lasers—has shown the fashion industry the different aesthetic technology can bring to designs.
When textile designer Kerri Wallace discusses what she sees as a growing trend in the use of technologies in the fashion world, she uses words that evoke change and embedded intelligence. Wallace says that the tipping point occurred with, "the excitement of items and products being intelligent and moving this intelligence away from conventional predominately 'hard' products, with the possibility and potential to become 'soft,' 'flexible' and 'invisible.'"
