The Swedish School of Textiles at the University of Borås is offering a Ph.D. student in Textile Design, a fantastic opportunity to be part of their team working on cutting edge – literally – textile technology including the development of techniques, methods, and aesthetic perspectives in the design of a new generation of textile products, including textile sound design, dynamic textile patterns, textile interaction design and textile space design.

Over the past years The Swedish School of Textiles has be immensely active in the education and research into wearable technology, making it one of the high profile centers in this field.

The position is on full time employment basis limited to 5 years. Admittance is September 2011. If you are interested in being at the cutting edge development of smart textiles click over to the Job Vacancy site at the University of Borås for the job offer details.

Future Textiles is the name of a three-week long event focusing on collecting and communicating knowledge about smart textiles.

The Future Textiles summit is hosted by the Knowledge Center for Smart Textiles at TEKO Design + Business, VIA University College, in Herning Denmark.

During the summit, Knowledge Centre for Smart Textiles organizes the exhibition ‘Pretty Smart Textiles‘, an international prize competition and a large number of seminars, workshops and master classes targeted to companies, teachers and students.

Besides the ‘Pretty Smart Textiles’ exhibition, workshops for students, a Masterclass for design teachers, an expert summit, seminars for the textile industry and for International Students are the events that urn over the three weeks.

Interesting for students from all over Europe who are invited to take part in the international prize competition and 6,500 EUR pocket money for the winner which will be announced on May 12th 2011

The Future Textiles Summit starts on May 2nd and for 3 weeks Denmark will be the center of the eTextile world.

More information of all activities can be found on the Textiles Future Website – go and check it out, this extensive summit program offers a large selection of events covering every aspect from research to business.

This link opens the Future Textiles program in PDF format.

The second edition of the Smart Textiles Salon, an initiative from the University of Ghent, Belgium and Systex, is well under way and accepting project submissions until March 15th.

Your project prototype should fit in the scope of the exhibition being textile based or compatible with intelligent textile systems.

Documents must be written in English with high resolution (300dpi) image resolution to Judith.Kenis@UGent.be The template for submission can be found on the Smart Textiles Salon website.

STS has only space for a maximum of 20 prototypes therefore a jury will select the projects and notify the participants end of March 2011.

Open up your eTextile treasure chest and submit your smart textile idea – cool prizes will await the winners and the opportunity to show your creation a high profile audience during the Smart Textiles Salon event on 21 April 2011 in Ghent.

A number of initiatives look into the sensible use of smart textiles, sensors embedded into the fabric of life like for medical purpose or evaluation performance in sport activities.

Using sensible, smart fabric covered airplane seats for a more comfortable and safer trip on these long distance flights of the future is a new angle but it does make a lot of sense to me.

SEAT (Smart tEchnologies for stress free Air Travel), a European project established under the roof of the Information Society Technologies (IST) Sixth Framework Program (FP6) is planing to upgrade airplane seats with senses.

The SEAT project scope is to develop smart responsive seats and interior environment with the capability of detecting physiological and psychological changes of passenger’s condition in real time based on a multi-sensor network integration into the textile seat covers.

Sitting still for a long time, as happens on flights, carries the risk of developing DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis). If the seats indicates to the cabin crew someone hasn’t moved for a long time and is in the group of people more likely to develop DVT, the passenger can be given special attention, encouragement to do some exercise.

Likewise if the smart seat indicates very frequent movements and raised pulse can be a sign of a nervous passenger to bay attention towards.

The smart seat could allow to create a more individual atmosphere for each person by adjusting light, temperature or seat position based on the passengers behavior observed by the smart textiles on the seat.

This all sounds fantastic but I wonder how long it will take to have these smart seats in action.

For the second time SYSTEX and the Ghent University called students around the world for smart textile designs and to select the yearly champion.

The 2010 winning entry is the Active Belt by Kunal Mankodiya from the Institute for Signal Processing, University of Lübeck, Germany.

Active Belt, the award winning project, investigates the longtime use of yarn based, woven fabric electrodes. To check their accuracy and reliability over time. Besides textile based electrodes the system design, signal processing and transmitting in an miniaturized, robust design is as important to be suitable as truly wearable solution.

ECG monitoring becomes one of the most important topics as more people reach higher age but also more people develop sometimes serious heart problems based on our stressful lifestyle. Monitoring the heart condition over longer time periods can significantly reduce further detonation of heart problems at an early stage.

Kunal Mankodiya’s work looks like to be a big step forward towards reliable and wearable heart monitoring integrated into clothing making discrete observation of our body without looking like being on a life extending machine.

Congrats to Kunal Mankodiya for his well deserved SYSTEX Smart Textiles Student Award which he will formally receive during the Smart Textiles Salon in Spring 2011 (place and time are not yet fixed).

Over the coming days we will introduce the other project submission for this award, highly interesting projects among them – stay tuned for more.

Visionaries at Bayer, a German high tech company directed their research power on photovoltaic according to a recently published press release.

The for us noticeable statement can be found towards the end of the press release stating ‘In future, photovoltaic applications could extend far beyond traditional solar modules. One such application could be a “translator shirt” for traveling salesmen and other people who travel a lot.

During a conversation, voice recognition software would be used to display the translated words on the shirt. “The surfaces of certain textiles can be equipped with photovoltaic elements, while other areas exhibit the properties of batteries. This would provide the power supply for the shirt,” explains Eckard Foltin from the Creative Center at Bayer MaterialScience.

The wearer of such high tech shirt would have to start the program and enter the target language via a label with integrated microphone and translation unit.

The optimism for envisioning the feasibility of a Translator shirt comes from the research Bayer scientists have made into photovoltaic thin-layer solar cells, Makrofol® polycarbonate encapsulation films that make it possible to produce flexible photovoltaic modules.

Based on the same technology and production processes not only solar cells can be made flexible enough to be integrated into fibers and textiles but also other silicon based functionality. And silicon after all is at the core of all electronics around us.

A translator shirt would be for sure a big hit in the market, imagine being able to buy one at the airport shop before you get on the plane to that great, distance location and your shirt is doing the speaking (or at least translation) for you.

Another reminder from the wearable technology event calendar: the ‘Smart Textiles Salon 2010‘ which will take place this year on October 18th in Dresden, Germany.

Remember our extensive coverage of the Smart Textiles Salon 2009? This event attracted many highly interesting projects, some of them publicly shown for the first time.

This year’s event promises to be as exiting as lasts years event. To ensure everyone can showcase his/her latest creation around Smart Textiles and wearable technologies the call is out for submission of demonstrators and prototypes.

To register your demonstrator or prototype you need to complete this application form (link points to a MS Word document) and send the completed form via e-mail to: Lina.Rambausek@UGent.be

The submission dateline is September 17th and the selected contributions will be notified latest by September 21st.

All these and more details can be found on the Systex Website.

The Smart Textiles Salon is, like last year, organized by the EU initiative SYSTEX and by Ghent University.

We will bring you affair an extensive coverage of the projects and the event. Stay tuned for regular and frequent updates from the Smart Textiles Salon on talk2myShirt.

The sweet summer holidays are coming to an end for most part of the world it’s time to quickly catch up in the working schedules.

To help you get back into the wearable technology event calendar here is a reminder for the upcoming ‘World Maker Faire New York eTextile Fashion Show‘ running from Sept. 25 to Sept. 26

The ‘eTextile Fashion Show’ is a production by Lynne Bruning who welcomes anyone to enter smart textile creations by sending her an email at: lynne@lynnebruning.com

There is no need for you to have a Maker Faire Booth Application, only bring your willingness to walk the runway with your design and share your creative power with other Makers.

The ‘World Maker Faire New York 2010‘ will be held at the New York Hall of Science.

Lynne is accepting projects which must be wearable, smart, computer driven, and/or interactive until Sept. 15

SYSTEX in connection with Ghent University – Department of Textiles is inviting the wearable electronic community to submit projects for this years SYSTEX Student Award 2010 and Smart-Textiles-Salon 2010.

Our extensive coverage about the SYSTEX Student Award 2009 may serve as inspirational source and motivation to participate in this years event.

Last years winner was Laura Wilson with her project the ‘Celestial Hybrid’.

To participate in the SYSTEX Student Award 2010 is easy: send a report about your project together with a your CV by email to Lieva.VanLangenhove@UGent.be with cc to: Lina.Rambausek@UGent.be or snail-mail the documents to the address indicated on the SYSTEX Student Award 2010 Website.

The deadline for submitting your project is June 30th 2010, still some time to formalize your great idea around smart textiles.

For more information click over to SYSTEX Student Award 2010 or check out the leaflet (link to .pdf document).

Your project, if selected will have the chance to be presented at the Smart Textiles Salon in autumn 2010.

Pretty Smart Textiles is the name of an exhibition about and around the latest innovations in eTextiles from Dutch artists and designers including Daan Roosegaarde, Maartje Dijkstra, Meg Grant, Nicky Assmann, Dorith Sjardijn, Melissa Coleman, Heike Sperber, Marina Venendaal, Karina van Heck, Florian Kräutli, Aduen Darriba, Joachim Rotteveel, Anouk Wipprecht, Charlotte ‘t Hart, Evelyn Lebis, Paula Kassenaar, Paula Segura Meccia and Mark Kwikkers.

Design.nl published a interview with the curators Melissa Coleman and Dorith Sjardijn about the motivation behind the exhibition and their view of the future of smart textiles.

Views and insights regular talk2myShirt reader will be familiar with like the recent trend of illuminated stage wear by artists, usually a field where visual attraction and clothing innovation trends make their first public appearance before catching the high street fashion market.

The interview provides interesting views about the ‘magic factor’ electronics can give to textile and clothing. The fascination of transforming, illuminating, singing textiles from visitors.

A highly recommended ‘must read article’ advice from my side. If you are near or around The Netherlands, maybe you can plan a side trip to the Nutshuis in The Hague. The ‘Pretty Smart Textiles’ exhibition is running until June 24, 2010