[-empyre-] Intro and Siggraph 2005 Report

[Katherine Moriwaki <kaki@kakirine.com>]

Hello list,

I'm joining in on the discussion, with a report from Siggraph 2005, which 
I've just recently finished participating in.

Siggraph is primarily a computer graphics conference, but this year 
included two events related to wearables. First was the Cyberfashion show, 
which is in its 3rd year running, and a Special Session on Extreme Fashion.

My post will be in two parts. First, the Extreme Fashion special session: 
http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/main.php?f=conference&p=special&s=extreme

I was a panelist  (www.kakirine.com) on the Extreme Fashion session with 
Dr. Maggie Orth (www.ifmachines.com) as moderator and Elise Co 
(www.mintymonkey.com), Dr. Jenny Tillotsen (www.jennytillotsen.com), and 
Dr. Thad Starner (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Thad.Starner/) as other 
participants. The session focused on the practical challenges facing 
practitioners in the field and the obstacles which stand in the way between 
the integration of fashion and technology.

Dr. Maggie Orth, founder of International Fashion Machines (IFM) presented 
an overview of fashion and technology, showing her own work developed as a 
graduate student at the MIT Media Lab and various projects which represent 
current trends in towards incorporating technology into garments. Her 
vision of a "true" fashion/technology hybrid was presented as a garment 
which contained input, processing, and output. Previous projects developed 
at the MIT Media Lab include the Firefly Dress, Musical Jacket, Embroidered 
Musical Instruments, and Electronic Tablecloths. At IFM Maggie invented 
Electronic Plaid with IFM co-founder Joey Berzowska. The non-emissive 
color-change textile uses silkscreened thermochromic inks over woven 
conductive yarns to create an addressable multi-pixel textile display. 
Another IFM product is a fuzzy pom-pom light switch dimmer which will be 
available on the market in September. Dr. Orth is considered a visionary in 
the field of electronic textiles, and has influenced a whole generation of 
up and coming interaction designers who are working with technology, 
fashion, and textiles.

Dr. Thad Starner, professor at Georgia Tech University and seminal 
researcher in the field of wearable computing presented recent work on low 
attention user interfaces. Having worn his wearable computer continuously 
since 1993, Dr. Starner provides an invaluable view from somebody who not 
only develops technology, but also actively lives and wears it on his body. 
Some exciting new research Dr. Starner presented included the wearable 
phone device that Heidi mentioned in her previous post - where input and 
control of the system is controlled by the number of fingers waved past the 
device, and also new work by colleagues centering on direct brain interfaces.

Dr. Jenny Tillotsen is affiliated with Central St. Martins College of Art 
and Design, her research into "scentsory design" looks at how clothing and 
accessories can emit scents to further well-being. Dr.Tillotsen's long-term 
vision includes incorporating micro-fluids into textiles using 
nano-technology which could disperse scent based on affective data. 
Tillotsen showed her recent creations including the Smart Second Skin 
Dress, and the Scent Whisper brooches. The Smart Second Skin Dress takes 
the central nervous system as its inspiration and emits scent based on the 
control of the wearer and affective data. The Scent Whisper brooches are a 
wirelessly connected pair. The transmitter triggers the release of a scent 
bubble in the receiver.

Elise Co is an independent designer. Having originally been drawn to the 
subject of fashion and technology through her graduate research at the MIT 
Media Lab, Co's recent direction has taken a sharp turn from highly 
conceptual work to very simple, yet practical ways of integrating 
technology into fashionable garments and accessories. In her presentation 
Elise showed the gritty details involved in constructing her Puddlejumper 
jacket - a garment which illuminates hand-silkscreened EL panels when a 
water sensor (two concentric rings of conductive ink) is triggered. Co also 
discussed her other more recent projects, Lumiloop, a reconfigurable LED 
bracelet, and UFOs, a modified set of sneakers with embedded accelerometer, 
in collaboration with Nikita Pashenkov.

As the final presenter in the session I discussed my work with Social 
Fashioning, or looking at clothing and accessories as the active conduit 
through which people create networked relationships in public space. I 
discussed fashion and technology within the context of urban flows and 
intersections, preferring to place my work between the frictions of the 
everyday and positing my projects as material artefacts which comment on 
contemporary life. I presented Urban Chameleon, a set of three skirts which 
visualize environmental data on the body (air quality, noise pollution, and 
physical touch) using everyday conditions a commuter might find themselves 
exposed to as inspiration. I also discussed my project Inside/Outside, 
which took the same environmental sensing capabilities (air quality and 
noise pollution) and put them into a network of handbags which could 
collect environmental data and both represent that information as an 
ambient display on the surface of the bag as well as connect that 
information with other bags in a distributed peer-to-peer network. The last 
project I discussed was Umbrella.net - a collaboration with Jonah 
Brucker-Cohen which turns the ordinary umbrella into a mobile ad-hoc 
network when multiple umbrellas are deployed in the same place.

The panel was extremely interesting and engaging. Each participant 
represented some combination of interdisciplinary practice, yet each 
presenter's approach and interests were very different. The intent was to 
showcase these divergent views and to provide a snapshot of where how the 
field might evolve. Admittedly the area is quite nascent, with huge 
technical (washability, durability, power requirements, and soft display 
technologies) and conceptual hurdles (how to go beyond things that merely 
"light up") however, with greater communication among researchers and 
practitioners (which we have already begun to see) there seems to be great 
excitement too. In my own observations I have seen the number of fashion 
and technology related projects explode in the last few years, from a mere 
trickle of projects to a whole sub-genre of art/tech/design with too many 
related artists and researchers to name here.

Hope this triggers questions or comments from readers out there. My next 
post to the list will include information and observations of the 
Cyberfashion show.

-Katherine