Girls hacking footwear

The growing Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture is a terrific platform for designers to innovate and explore new designs for wearable technology without having to rely on engineers and developers to build proof-of-concepts. Norene Leddy hosted a workshop called Project Walkway at Eyebeam that invited teenage girls to create their own technology-infused footwear. The workshop was inspired by Leddy’s Aphrodite project, which is a DIY kit that allows you to electronically enhance platform shoes.

What’s great about this workshop in additional to using DIY techniques to explore potential designs, is that Leddy aims to introduce teenage girls to electronics and wearable technology by hacking an electronics kit originally targeted to boys called a “Macho Meter”. Here’s how they describe it:

"A foam platform shoe is outfitted with the "Macho Meter," an electronics kit designed for young boys that uses basic circuitry and LED lights. The Eyebeam Center's Girl Eye View program adapted the Macho Meter into a technical fashion statement during the Project Walkway program."

More info can be found on the Project Walkway blog.

Hand-recording your experiences

Valeria Fuso has designed Jik, a glove that records your experiences by capturing video, images and sound in the context of where you are. Fuso is brilliantly exploring natural gestures as the interface that triggers recording actions such as holding your hand in the shape of a circle up to your eye, which tells the glove to begin recording an image and holding your hand up like signing the number "5" to tell the glove to record sound.

The idea of using natural gestures to trigger actions is ripe with opportunities. Now that this version is complete, I wish to see Jik implemented into something other than a glove so that it is more seamlessly integrated into the things we do and wear. In other words, what if Fuso's natural gestures were implemented into a full-fledged garment?

Imagine a garment that understands the direction you turn, if you are bent or sitting, if your arms are lifted or not, the elevation your cuffs are in, if it's buttoned up or not... How can this idea be pushed further into a more seamlessly integrated solution where the technology is more discrete and hidden?