V2_ Knowledgebase

The Tampere University of Technology (TUT) Department of Electronics has conducted research in wearable technology since 1997. The TUT Kankaanp‰‰ Unit, established in 2003, is a research unit specialized in wearable technology. It is a part of a wearable technology competence center located in Kankaanp‰‰, Finland. The Kankaanp‰‰ Unitís personnel are very interdisciplinary and include researchers from electronics, material technology and textile technology background. This enables us to conduct extensive research on different aspects of wearable technology and quickly adapt information and new results from various disciplines.

A much-needed overview of aspects of fashion history and how to understand it with clear, jargon-free text to help all lay readers, collectors, as well as students of fashion history. The author is a leading authority on fashion history with experience as a writer, teacher and curator. Illustrated throughout with plates, photographs, paintings and drawings, the book is divided up into the following chapters: What is dress, and how and why is it studied? Theories of dress and fashion and how they have evolved; Collections of dress and textiles and their importance as a source of information about social and technological change; Dress in art and dress as art; Dress as an indicator of role and status; Dress and cultural imperialism: absorption of non-Western ideas in fabric and the imposition of Western dress in preference to indigenous styles.

I recently graduated from the MIT Media Lab and co-founded ESKI. I also make electronic textiles at XS Labs, and teach Physical Computing in the Design & Computation Arts department at Concordia University. This is a chronological repository of interactive artefacts I have had the opportunity to build and play with. Feel free to use and abuse these ideas in accordance with the license below.

We are attempting to address the computing research issues that arise in the successful realization of e-textiles. Our approach to this process is to build physical prototypes and employ extensive simulation to explore the vast design space in e-textiles. Towards that end, we are constructing a modeling and simulation environment to explore that space.

"Wearable Technology & Powered Art and Fashion Design" presents latest developments in the area of technologically augmented clothing. The program crosses the disciplines of fashion design, performance art, wearable computing and interaction design. The selected pieces envision a future in which our second skin, our clothes, become relevant element in our social life, in our communication and interaction with others. This is achieved by embedding electronics seamlessly into the textiles. After the miniaturisation of processors, sensors and batteries designers can now use these to create expressive and performative garments beyond the everyday experience.

The XY interactive textile is a large tactile interface for playing electronic music. The performer plays it simply by the movement of his/her hand on it's surface. This textile interface allows users to compose and interpret electronic music by choreographic movements. By its size, its texture, its flexibility and its transparency, this textile interface involves the whole body in the musical interpretation.

There has been much prior research on integrating electronics into textiles. However, I felt that many of these projects did not take into account the usability and interactivity of the fabric. Much of the prior work is focused on rigid, exact places for touching the fabric, rather than supporting the many actions our hands and bodies can create. Thus, I wanted to make a device that could capture the richness of active touch interactions. These haptic interactions could be used to create expressive music.