Swine flu mask reacts to your temperature

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"Tis the season for the flu, and if the regular strain wasn’t bad enough, we have a new, porcine terror to contend with. These brightly patterned medical face masks, however, may ward off H1N1 and its brethren simply by virtue of being stylish—looking like Wacko Jacko in his latter days notwithstanding. Designed by Marjan Kooroshnia, a Swedish textile-design student, these face masks have a bonus feature: They’re printed with thermochromic ink that changes color with any uptick in breathing temperature." (source)

If you've ever experimented with thermochromatic inks, I am skeptical that this concept will even work as the variations of temperature from your breath might be too small. Some of the inks are fairly sensitive to heat so the pattern might change no matter what temperature your breath is. Regardless, it's a nice concept.

Read the rest of the article on couterre. Images from couterre.

Electronic fabrics workshop, July 11

I’m running a wearable technology workshop this weekend at Frayedwire, which will introduce people to soft-circuits and how to work with conductive threads. Here's the workshop:

Making Electronic Fabrics: Integrating Conductive Thread, LEDs, and Soft Switches into fabrics

This workshop will be a hands-on session focused on integrating electronics into fabrics and making soft switches out of snaps, hooks, zippers and other fashion-hardware. We will be making fashion accessory Palz, soft plush robots that light up when they hold hands. Turn a snap into a switch that turns an LED on and off. All of the circuitry will be sewn directly into the fabric. I'll also be talking a little about the Lilypad (Arduino for wearable technology).

See pics of the workshop and project here.

Blogging in motion

Wearable technology designers Diana Eng & Emily Albinski co-founded Black Box Nation, a fashion technology company, where they created their Blogging in Motion project during a Yahoo! hack day back in 2006. The purse has an integrated GPS and a camera that is connected to a basic stamp. It measures your movement by steps. Every 20 or so steps triggers the camera to snap a photo, which it then sends to a blog automatically via your cell phone that you presumably have clipped into the hardware.

What's interesting about this project is the idea of wearable technology communicating with online sources such as social networking sites and blogs. Imagine being able to keep up with all of your social networking sites through passive and natural gestures.

More info on the project's team via Black Box Nation.

Light as body ornamentation

Designer Kyeok Kim’s is exploring new forms of generating body ornamentation including objects that leave decorative imprints on the skin, jewelry that prints decorative traces on the skin, and stringy textures that create ornamental silhouettes.

One of his recent explorations includes a collection of jewelry that projects patterns onto the wearer's skin called Aurora. Here's how Kim describes it: "‘Aurora’ creates patterns of light on the body as ornamentation, extending the ornamented space around the body and restyling its decorative silhouette by motion. ‘Aurora’ highlights the relationship between different pieces of jewellery, by its nature the pieces interact with the another. To operate the decorative light, one must gently move the ring (containing a magnet) towards the main jewellery piece."

Illuminating glass jewelry

German-born IT consultant and designer Marc Mann has created a line of gorgeous illuminating jewelry. According to the Hilde Leiss Gallery, "Exotic deep-sea creatures, early kaleidoscopes and gothic cathredal windows served as the inspirational source for the jeweLight collection."

Mann hides small LEDs inside the glass material, which results in a soft glow that brings out the aesthetics of its natural texture and characteristics. For power, the designer discretely integrates small coin cell batteries into the clasp or a small tag that is attached to the piece.

Jewelry as our home base

Mouna Andraos, in collaboration with Sonali Sridhar, has designed Address Necklace, which "is a handmade electronic jewelry piece. When you first acquire the pendant, you select a place that you consider to be your anchor – where you were born, your home, or perhaps the place you long to be. Once the jewelry is initialized, every time you wear the piece it displays how many kilometers you are from that location."

With our increasingly mobile and transient lives, the project helps to give a sense of home, or it helps us aspire to where we want to be. The necklace implementation is great since it allows you to take it will you everywhere no matter what you are wearing.