Jennifer Darmour, the lady behind Electricfoxy.com not only maintains an interest wearable technology blog she is creating one of the most beautiful, sensible and interesting designs, melting technology into fashion design in a way that makes the technology part of the aesthetics and not an add-on.

Ping the social  networking garment was the first of her amazing creations followed by her latest design the ZIP, a garment with integrated phone and music player control by using zipper as user control element.

Zip up your jacket up to protect yourself from the outside world and with the same gesture to increase the volume, building a sound cloud around you.

Zip down to open yourself to the surroundings and at the same time decrease decrease the volume of your music, to be more aware of what is going on around or tug on the pull-straps to retract the integrated ear-buds, a lovely smart design.

A nice design twist is the device pocket with retractable connector allowing to take out the device for quick adjustments without disconnecting the wearer from the sound cloud.

Jennifer’s philosophy behind ZIP is to control our personal devices tucked away in our pockets simply by performing natural gestures that are built into the mechanics of the garments we wear – like a zip or a pull-strap.

Check out the ZIP project page, it’s full of information and details about the inside of the ZIP garment.

A refreshing new concept design for a technology that has been around for some time, the iDevice controlling jackets and bags of yesterday. May be we will see ZIP garments in the not so far future as Jennifer designed the ZIP garment to be manufactured with both the pattern and circuit design aimed for production.

Austrian Designer Wolfgang Langeder and the Fraunhofer IZM / Stretchable Circuits in Berlin, have joined forces to develop Smart Urban Wear with focus on an innovative display on clothing.

‘The utope project approaches a textile utopia: The exterior of clothing becomes a display. This creates the possibility to change its surface like a chameleon skin or to use it like a computer display.

The first model in the Smart Urban Wear collection is the ‘Cybernomade Suit‘, an intelligent business suit.

The integrated display interacts with a smart phone tucked away in a pocket inside the jacket and indicates an incoming call or SMS on the jacket outside.

Besides the sophisticated look this interactive style element which is building the bridge between the soft, digital world and the physical world, the indication of an income call or message does not require humble excuses when talking with someone and the buzzer goes on in our pocket.

Personally I prefer to see pleasant to look at light on my conversation partner coming to life telling me he/she will pick up the phone instead of trying to find lame excuses for putting our conversation on hold.

I am curiously looking forward to the expansion of the Smart Urban Wear collection from Wolfgang Langeder in cooperation with the wearable technology wizards at the Fraunhofer IZM and Stretchable Circuits.

While researching for the origins of wearable electronics one can find quite surprising and interesting activities dating back to a time when wearable electronics was a exotic insider term.

The Inside/Outside bag created by Katherine Moriwaki has been a visionary design back in 2003.

The handbag has an air quality sensor and audio microphone integrated and connected to a micro-controller. While walking around with such a bag through the city, changes in the surrounding air quality and noise levels heat up the conductive thread woven into the bags outer material which is impregnated with Thermochromic ink.

The heating and subsequently cooling trigger by the change in air conditions and/or ambient noise levels change the colors of the Thermochromic ink from one shade to another.

The visualization of the environmental condition is not only targeted towards the wearer/carrier of such smart handbag it is also highly visible to people around, acting as a messenger and hopefully triggers a more environmental aware lifestyle.

Visualization is the strongest form of presenting information in a more lasting way. Combining this with objects we wear brings the message out even stronger.

The use of Thermochromic ink combined with smart electronics has since the creation of the Inside/Outside bag attracted more wearable technology designer. An appealing technology tandem with a sensible potential to monitor, indicate and inform about the state of the environment around us.

Katherine Moriwaki is an Assistant Professor of Media Design in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Follow this link to explore and get inspired from Inside/Outside and other projects of Katherine in the wearable technology space.

Belonging to the new generation of fashion-tech designer, Anouk Wipprecht understands very well how to make use of technology to re-invent fashion design. Fashion design, used to provoke, to challenging but also connecting to social values has always been at the forefront of fashion design.

Using technology like Anouk Wipprecht opens up almost unimaginable possibilities for fashion designer to push the boundaries of the interaction between our body, the environment and our social values.

Anouk who is still at the early stage of her career as Fashion-tech designer created exceptional Haute-Tech designs during her student years like the Cat-Bag or the self-painting Pseudomorph Dress.

‘Intimacy Black‘, her latest creation is using e-foil which transforms from black to transparent. Anouk’s design enables the wearer to engage in a wholly ‘super-natural’ experience with her own skin.

Anouk based the ‘Intimacy Black’ on Daan Roosegaarde ‘e-fashion’ work which acts like a second skin that transforms the body of the wearer into an interface.

The Intimacy dresses are made using wireless, interactive technologies and smart foils that become transparent when electrified. The distance between a spectator and the garment determines the garments’ level of transparency.

The team working on the Intimacy project consist of Daan Roosegaarde, Maartje Dijkstra, Anouk Wipprecht, V2_ Lab (Simon de Bakker, Stan Wannet, Piem Wirtz) and Studio Roosegaarde (Peter de Man, João Carneiro).

Read more about the Intimacy e-fashion project at V2_

Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz, the creative force behind CuteCircuit are pushing the limits of wearable technology far into the future with their recent activities which ranges from illuminated stage-wear for artists to launching their own CuteStore for technology enhanced fashion.

In the ‘coming soon…’ section of the store we can find the famous Hug Shirt and the latest and coolest addition, the M-Dress.

The M (Mobile Phone) Dress is, as the name says, a mobile phone in form of a dress. That’s the coolest mobile phone form factor there will be on the market, surpassing the iPhone be far, at least from style perspective.

I am of course as curious as you our dear reader how this dressed up phone will work but according to CuteCircuit’s Website it does accept a standard SIM card which goes into a small slot underneath the label and the antenna is concealed in the hem of the dress. No mention which battery is used or where it will be stored in the dress.

The M-Dress will have the phone number of the SIM card you have used in the old days where people used plastic and metal boxes to make a phone call.

When the dress rings (or may be vibrating is more appropriate) raising the arm to your ear will open the call triggered by a motion sensor. Putting your arm down will close the call. Simple and beautiful.

CuteCircuit has developed special gesture recognition software to enable the smart M-Dress to work in an intuitive way, blending into the fabric of our digital life.

Lets hope CuteCircuit is also serving the other half of the population, the boys, with a similar futuristic designed piece of garment.

We all know the iPhone with it’s application variety can control almost anything imaginable. So it was only a matter of time that creative minds made the link to clothing.

Artistic designer Alexander Reeder in collaboration with Yutaka Takahashi and Junpei Wada link up the iPhone with a jacket that can contain various modules such as an 8×8 LED matrix display on the back.

The iPhone loaded with an application can then turn the back of the jacket into your very personal message board to scroll your Twitter feeds, show your mood status or visualize the beat of your song you are listening.

Another module in the making is interesting for bikers, a flip of the wrist will illuminate the wrist area indicating your left or right turn. I could very well imagine some sort of breaking lights in the jacket as the iPhone with the integrated accelerometer can detect when you hit the breaks on the bike.

As far as I can see on Alexander’s Web site the iPhone controlled jackets will be produced and launched later this year, so this is not a design concept and looks like this is going to be commercially available in time for Christmas.

Watch the video below to get an idea how the ‘Vanilla Series’ of iPhone jackets will work.

This seems to be the first clothing item that does not control the iPhone like the iPod/i{hone enabled jackets we have seen in the past with textile keypads on the sleeve but these Vanilla Jackets are controlled by an iPhone.

I see this as another interesting step towards more interactive clothing.

[via: Fashioning Technology]

WAb (Wearable Absence) is an interactive garment connecting to a database wireless via a mobile device to enhance the wearers emotional stage with prerecorded memories in audio/visual from.

The WAb garment is fitted with a range of senors that detect heart rate and skin conductivity which allow to calculate the stress or relaxed level, excitement or balanced physical stage.

A database is loaded with audio (music) and visual (photos) content the owner of the WAb garment categorizes to recreate memories associated to different  physical conditions.

Bio sensors send continuously the physical condition of the wearer to the database which returns the associated audio/visual stimulus to the garments integrated speaker and display, recreating memories based on the current physical condition.

We select clothing based not only on functional needs we choose clothing to a high degree out of emotional reasons. Adding additional emotional elements as demonstrated in the WAb design or other memory rich clothing concepts is a logical next step in fashion enabled through  wearable technologies.

Clothing that gives us stimulus based on or changing mood swings and not based on a pre-set time line or play-list has a magical, surprising factor.

WAb is a collaboration project between Barbara Layne, Director of Studio subTela at Hexagram-Concordia in Montreal and Janis Jefferies, Artistic Director of the Digital Studios at Goldsmiths College in London.

[via: Fashioning Technology]

Hilary Hayes, industrial design student at the Ontario College of Art&Design (OCAD) in Toronto created a scarf which features dynamic light pattern depending on your breathing.

She got the inspiration for this design from two areas, one being the fact that during winter time when the temperature reaches the freezing point we see our breath and that of others in form of water vapor clouds hanging in front of our faces.

Her second inspirational area comes from the fact that people effected by asthma have to be more ware of their breathing pattern.

Hilary took her breathing observations and beautified them by merging some eTextile magic with a clothing accessory like a scarf.

A LilyPad temperature sensor, the LilyPad Arduino and power supply modules are integrated into the scarf. The temperature sensor near the mouth picks up the temperature variations which is translated via the LilyPad to points instead of degrees making this design concept independent of winter time only use.

The LEDs in the scarf fade in and out in sync with the breathing, creating a subtile, dynamic light pattern on the scarf. A lovely style concept which could be transfered to a ‘hard wired’ eTextile chip to be used by fashion designers as an option to create more interactivity into future fashion.

[via: Electricfoxy]

One of the differences between technology and fashion is the way inspiration for new designs are gathered. Technologists get inspired by looking in the distant future of Starwars while fashion designer draw a great deal of inspiration from the past. This is strictly generic speaking and I am not saying fashion designer are working on yesterday.

As we combine both worlds into wearable technology each side has to give in a bit. Following the fashion designer side in this article I like to direct your attention to a wearable electronic project which I think provides a source of inspiration and insights on which present and future eTextile designer can build upon – technologists as well as fashion designer.

In 2005 Joanna Berzowska, a pioneer in wearable electronics, created the Intimate Memory clothing consisting of a Skirt that records physical interaction such as touch events and gradually changing color to show how often it has come into contact with other people or objects.

The skirt will show the touch memories at the end of the day in from of color changing patterns, depending on how often a touch occurred.

Her second piece in this project is the Intimate Memory Shirt which has a microphone in the collar and a series of light points at the front of the shirt. When a friend or partner whispers something into the ear, the microphone will record this event and the lights will light up, showing that an intimate event has occurred.

The number of lights indicates the intensity of the intimacy. Over time, the lights turn off, one by one, to show how long it has been since the intimate event took place.

These examples demonstrate how the use of different inputs from our environment can be combined with fashion to interact, to transform it’s appearance but also the possibility to interweave our behavior, our social interaction into our clothing and use this to shape and form our outfit dynamically.

There is a high probability the Climate Dress was made by a Danish cooperation consisting of design studio Diffus, Danish designer Tine M. Jensen, Swiss embroidery company Forster-Rohner, the Danish research-company Alexandra Institute and finally the Danish School of Design.

Sadly, the recently broken closed down climate conference COP15 did not come up with any significant agreement or result on addressing the arising problems CO2 has on pour climate, the Climate Dress might be the best thing to look for now.

The Climate Dress is made of conductive embroidery and contains over hundred LEDs inserted into the embroidery.

The twist on this dress: it includes a CO2 sensor which monitors the surrounding air for the CO2 level, send the data to a LilyPad Arduino which then visualizes the pollution level via LED light pattern on the dress.

While the presentation of this functionality could have been done in a more ‘work-wear’ or other professional clothing item, alerting persons working in hazardous environments, I love the presentation in from of an fashionable dress which, to my opinion, is hammering home the message of CO2 and climate change more powerful than it would have been in work-wear.

The team around the Climate Dress did a very good job in designing a meaningful, wearable electronic object which points into a direction where we might end up having CO2 scanner and visualizer in our everyday clothing to see when it’s time to go indoors or to other less polluted places.