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.

Joanna Berzowska was one of the first personalities I got to know at the begin of my wearable technology dedication. She is one of the pioneers in the wearable electronic space, creating insightful and highly innovative technologies and designs over the past seven years.

Joanna founded XS Labs in 2002, in her first year at Concordia University, positioning XS Lab as a design research studio with focus on innovation in electronic textiles and reactive garments.

At the center of research at XS Labs is the development of enabling technologies, methods and materials in the form of soft electronic circuits and composite fibers — as well as the exploration of the expressive potential of soft reactive structures.

To list down all the innovative, inspirational work Joanna and her XS Lab team has made over these past seven year would result in a very long blog posting but fortunately, Joanna did this work very nicely in form of gorgeous looking and highly informative catalog in PDF format titled ‘XS Labs – Seven years of design research and experimentation in electronic textiles and reactive garments’.

This link directs you directly to the Catalog.

This 70 page catalog is a must read for wearable technologists and is certainly a great enrichment for students supporting their research studies in field of wearable technology.

Get the catalog – load it on your tablet and have it at your fingertips wherever you go.

Congratulation to Joanna and the XS Lab team for sharing seven years of amazing work.

What better place one can imagine to show off fashion and technology then the annual technology center of the universe, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011 bringing the next generation of wearable technology on the FashionWare runway.

This evening event will be hosted by high-tech fashion designer and author of Fashion Geek, Diana Eng sending models wearing the latest digital fashions and accessories down the runway.

“FashionWare will look at how fashion designers use technology to not only invent a new aesthetic but change the way we interact with our clothing,” said Eng who is designing a techno-fashion collection for this show.

FashionWare attendees can expect to see a variety of innovation such as programmable dresses, transforming garments, bio-responsive accessories and cell phone controlled clothing.

A sneak peek of Diana Eng’s design sketches can be found in the slide-show below.

The FashionWare runway show is part of the second annual MommyTech Summit, one of six one-day conferences produced by Living in Digital Times to analyze how technology affects consumers from children and college students to parents and senior citizens.

The FashionWare runway show will be held at the Fashion Show Mall located at 3200 Las Vegas Blvd South on Friday, Jan. 7 at 6 pm.

[source: Press release via Diana Eng]

ISWC (International Symposium on Wearable Computers) invites submissions of original works of wearable technology for its 2011 Juried Exhibition.

Submissions may comprise any type of wearable technology (electronic, mechanical, textile, garments, etc), and designers are encouraged to submit works of practical technology as well as works of art.

ISWC 2011 will be the fifteenth annual IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, a forum for wearable computing and issues related to on-body and worn mobile technologies.

Accepted works will be exhibited at the ISWC 2011 conference, in San Francisco, CA, June 12-15, 2011 . During the conference, the jury will select 3 prizewinners: Best Concept, Best Execution, and Best in Show.

You have still plenty of time to create a fabulous design, the submission deadline is on February 28th 2011

You may also want to check out information of previous ISWC events via this link, these infos may help you the get inspired.

More details about participation can be found via this link.

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

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.

It looks like we can create a section for job openings in wearable electronic. After Adidas started building up their wearable electronic team Polar is now starting to build their wearable electronic team. If you are interested and match Polar’s job profile you can apply for the ‘Specialist, Textile Engineering and Wearable Electronics‘.

The wearable electronic specialist at Polar will be responsible for specification, design, implementation and verification of wearable electronics and textiles in Polar products. The job will include maintaining existing textile products as well as designing new pilot products, materials, features, textures, and techniques.

Applicants are expected to have strong experience in textile design and wearable electronics next to obvious things like textile or electronic degree, experience of supplier relations and manufacturing and more.

Read the complete application guidelines on this site. Applications for this job must be send no later than August 29th – so still some time to polish your CV.

There is just one catch – the work location of the Specialist in Textile Engineering and Wearable Electronics for Polar is at their headquarters in Kempele, Finland.

In case you haven’t seen yet the comment on our blog posting about Adidas search for a wearable electronic designer, they have also a job opening for a Wearable Electronics Development Engineer for Software & Hardware development.

According to the job opening your area of operation will be as a member of the adidas Wearable Sports Electronics (aWSE) to deliver new innovative wearable sports electronics garments.

The focus in this job will be on the ideation, development, realization and test validation of embedded software and hardware components, as well as the creation and integration of new methods for signal treatment and algorithms.

Sounds again highly interesting and as I am very sure that the majority of talk2myShirt reader will be highly motivated working for a top brand and wearable electronic development the only thing only you can judge is: are you fit to take on the challenge?

For more details and to apply for that job check out the Adidas Job profile page.

Generative Wardrobe by designer Alex Dodge is a concept study that explores various wearable technologies to form a complete system from head to the toes.

Starting with a highly futuristic head cap called ‘Sleep Talker‘ envisioned to allow the broadcasting of one’s unconscious experience = dreams on social networks. Facebook with a dream status update – how does this sound?

Haptic-Synth is an undergarment type of thin shirt embedded with with an array of Haptic-Synth ‘cells’. Each cell contains a compression touch sensor coupled with a miniature haptic feedback actuator. The Haptic-Synth shirt acts as gesture based input and feedback device for the complete wearable technology system.

A light, cross-seasonal jacket called Wearable Interface explores the possibilities of embedding mobile technologies in a ardent serving as CPU for future wearable technology systems.

The jacket’s on-board processor with connections to USB ports, GPS, accelerometers, microphones, temperature or photo sensors, can be trained and programmed to interact with a range of other devices.

Last but not least interesting is the Powerstep, a pair of nicely design shoes converting mechanical energy via piezoelectric ceramic components inside the sole into electric current with each step.

[TomsGuide via GizmoWatch]

According to a job opening posting the Adidas Group is looking for a Textronics Senior Industrial Designer ‘to create wearable electronics performance innovations which drive the advanced product process from opportunity identification through production reality.’

Textronics, founded by Stacey Burr, created and commercialized a range of heart rate monitoring running tops and shirts using their patented textile electrodes.

Adidas acquired Textronics a few years ago and in turn launched Adidas branded runner tops and shirts with the same, textile electrodes seamlessly woven into the garment.

Adidas made some small steps into the wearable technology arena most with iconic concept products like the Adidas 1 high-tech sneaker or more recently the Adidas Cyber Sneakers.

This job opening does suggest that Adidas is planning to get more active in integrating technology in their product range as one of the key areas for the future Senior Industrial Designer will be to ‘Design and develop cutting edge product innovations that lead the wearable sports electronics category innovation agendas.’

From (my) wearable technology perspective this is interesting news as it suggests that a top brand in the sports apparel market will certainly lead to surprisingly innovative, technology enhanced fitness outfit in the near future.