Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: micro-robotics and 3D-printing are poised to revolutionise fashion, says the designer of Lady Gaga’s bubble-blowing dress, in the second part of our interview with Studio XO.

Despite a conservative fashion industry, rapid changes in technology will transform the clothes we wear, says Benjamin Males, of London-based fashion and technology company Studio XO.

“We believe fashion is quite antiquated,” he says. “While everything around us becomes intelligent, becomes more computational, our clothes are still very old-fashioned”.

This will not be the case for long, says Males, who believes that advances in micro-robotics and transformable textiles will soon make their way into everyday clothing, helping create clothes that can change shape using small motors.

“We believe in the next decade we’re going to see some pretty amazing things happen around transformable textiles and mechanical movement in our clothes: we are looking at introducing that in the next five years,” he says.

He points to the ubiquitous use of smartphones as evidence that people are becoming increasingly comfotable with having sophisticated technology on or very close to their bodies.

Moving up and down a clothes size may soon be possible without having to buy new clothes, predicts Males.

“We [will soon be able to] change the fit of our clothes at the push of a button, or our clothes could form new architectures around us,” he says.

Males is one of the founding partners of Studio XO, whose work includes dresses for Lady Gaga: Volantis, a flying dress powered by 12 electric motor-driven rotors, and the bubble-blowing dress Anemone, which is documented in this movie.

Males describes Studio XO’s Anemone as a provocation and a commentary on the future of textiles.

Anemone is a dress that blows large and small bubbles, the small ones creating a foam structure around the wearer and the large bubbles flying away.

Males calls the mechanisms that create this effect bubble factories. These are small, 3D-printed jaw mechanisms. When they open, a fan blows out large or small bubbles depending on the size of the mechanism’s aperture.

The dress was unveiled in 2013, when Lady Gaga wore it to the iTunes festival. It is the second so-called bubble dress which Lady Gaga has worn, the first one being a nude leotard with plastic transparent globes attached to it.

The music featured in the movie is a track by Simplex. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

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button” within five years appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: in this exclusive video interview, musician Imogen Heap demonstrates the electronic gloves that allow people to interact with their computer remotely via hand gestures.

The interview was filmed at Heap‘s home studio outside London, shortly before she launched her Kickstarter campaign to produce a limited production run of the open-source Mi.Mu gloves.

“These beautiful gloves help me gesturally interact with my computer,” says Heap, explaining how the wearable technology allows her to perform without having to interact with keyboards or control panels.

Pushing buttons and twiddling dials “is not very exciting for me or the audience,” she says. “[Now] I can make music on the move, in the flow and more humanly, [and] more naturally engage with my computer software and technology.”

Working with a team of developers and musicians, Heap has mapped movements made with the gloves to musical functions such as drum sounds or bass notes, changes of pitch, arpeggios and filters.

“What this glove enables me to do is access mappings inside my computer so that I don’t have to go to a keyboard or a fader or a button,” she says.

For example, instead of using a finger to push a fader on a mixing desk, Heap can raise her arm to achieve the same affect. By raising her hand, she can move through a scale of notes, or through pinching together her thumb, middle and forefinger and rotating it, she can apply filters to the sound.

Each gesture-control glove contains a wifi-enabled x-IMU board developed by x-IO Technologies containing an accelerometer, a magnetometer and a gyroscope.

These work together with a series of motion sensors incorporated into the fingers of each glove that track the degree of bend and the spread of the fingers. The gloves can also understand postures such as an open palm, a finger-point or a closed fist.

The latest version of the gloves feature e-textile technology, where sensors and wiring are integrated into fabric. Heap is now exploring how to make further use of electronically conducting textiles, to reduce the number of hard components in the gloves.

Heap says they will not just change performance, but the production of music too: “We really feel that they are going to change the way we make music.”

Heap’s Kickstarter campaign aims to raise £200,000 to develop and produce a limited production run of Mi.Mu gloves. If successful, she will make both the hardware and software open source, allowing people to develop their own uses for the technology. “It’s really exciting to see what people might do by hacking them,” said Heap. The Kickstarter campaign closes on 3 May 2014.

The music featured in this movie is Me, the Machine, a track that Heap wrote specifically to be performed using the gloves.

for more information about the technology in the gloves, read the edited transcript of our interview with Heap.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

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make music,” says Imogen Heap appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: architect and designer Daniel Widrig explains how he uses technology borrowed from the special effects business to design everything from jewellery to skyscrapers.

In this movie we filmed in Miami, Daniel Widrig says that designers can break down boundaries between disciplines by borrowing technologies and tools traditionally associated with one industry and using them in other industries, in unexpected ways.

“A lot of technology we use was originally developed for use in other disciplines such as special effects or the movie industries,” says Widrig. “One could say that boundaries are blurring between industries”

Widrig discusses his projects including a 370-metre tower on the outskirts of Istanbul, Turkey, a collection of dresses produced in collaboration with fashion designer Iris van Herpen and a series of 3D-printed stools.

Widrig trained at the Architecture Association in London and worked at Zaha Hadid Architects prior to starting his own practice in 2009.

His architectural background feeds into his ongoing research into using 3D-printing for clothing and jewellery, says Widrig.

“We work with the body in quite an architectural way: we investigated certain body parts and then we applied design processes to populate body parts with architectural microstructures,” he says.

One of these works was the Kinesis wearable sculptures he produced last year and showed during Design Miami.

For Widrig, it is often the experimental, low-budget projects that yield the most new ideas.

“The most interesting projects for me are the self-imitated projects where you set yourself a goal and an agenda and you work with sometimes really small budgets, but you have the freedom to explore,” he explained.

These then feed into more commercial projects, from experimental furniture to sculpture, computer game design and movie sets.

The music featured in the movie is a track by Simplex. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The post Software advances are “blurring
boundaries between design disciplines” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: wearable technology will revolutionise healthcare for doctors and patients alike, says the director of design studio Vitamins in our final movie from December’s Wearable Futures conference.

“In the future there’s no doubt that wearable technologies are going to be part of our everyday lives,” says Duncan Fitzsimons of Vitamins. Increased usage of personal health-monitoring devices will be one example of this, he says, making the “the doctor-patient relationship change [for the] better”.

Fitzsimons explains how the current constraints on an appointment between patient and doctor – lack of time and lack of information – can be mitigated by personal monitoring devices that collect patient data over a long period of time.

“When we are ill at the moment we only see the doctor for a very small amount of time. This is just a snapshot in the progress of your illness,” he says.

“If [a doctor] has access to a wider amount of data, they’ll be able to see how your illness has started, progressed and perhaps is tailing off,” he continues. “That will enable them to have a lot more information to diagnose you better and also enable you to have a more transparent window into your health so that you can understand it better as well.”

For these benefits to be realised, Fitzsimons says the technology to record this data needs to be attractive and easy to use, citing two examples of products by healthcare company Qardio: the QardioArm, which measures blood pressure and the QardioCore, a wearable ECG (electrocardiogram) monitoring device, commonly used to detect abnormal heart rhythms. Both are designed, says Fitzsimons, to look unlike medical devices and use a smartphone as the interface with the patient.

[The above paragraph was amended on 27 February 2014. Previously, it was stated that Vitamins would be launching the QardioArm and QardioCore products.]

Fitzsimons is the co-founder of Vitamins, the design studio which last year won the transport category at the Design Museum Designs of the Year 2013 awards for its Folding Wheel project.

This is the fifth and final movie from the two-day Wearable Futures conference that explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.

In the first movie, designer of Dita von Teese’s 3D-printed gown Francis Bitonti explained how advances in design software mean “materials are becoming media”. In the second, Suzanne Lee explained how she makes clothes “grown using bacteria.” In the third, Shamees Aden explained how scientists are combining non-living chemicals to create materials with the properties of living organisms. In the fourth, Pauline van Dongen called for wearable technology to “transcend
 the world of gadgets”.

The music featured in the movie is a track by DJ Kimon. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The post Wearable technology will “transform
the doctor-patient relationship” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: scientists are combining non-living chemicals to create materials with the properties of living organisms, says the creator of a self-repairing shoe made from protocells.

Protocells, as the chemical cocktails are known, are made by mixing basic non-living molecules in lab conditions. These then combine to create substances that exhibit some of the characteristics of living cells: the ability to metabolise food, to move and to reproduce.

In this movie Dezeen filmed at the Wearable Futures conference in December, designer and materials researcher Shamees Aden explains how “scientists are now mixing together groups of chemicals [to make] them behave like living cells. They are able to reconfigure, they are able to adapt to light, pressure and heat.”

The synthetic production of living materials is so far limited to basic applications – modifying the behaviour of oil droplets in a water solution, for example – but Aden has developed a proposal that uses protocells to make self-regenerating soles for a pair of running shoes.

The Amoeba running shoes designed by Aden use protocells’ capabilities of responding to pressure, and inflates or deflates according to the texture of ground the wearer is running on to provide more or less cushioning.

Photocells, which have a limited life span, would be replenished after each run, explains Aden. “Your shoe box would be a vessel which would hold the [protocell] liquid inside. You could buy your protocell liquid and it would be dyed any colour you like and you would pour that in and as the shoe is rejuvenated the colours would emerge.”

The speculative project is the result of a collaboration with chemist Dr Michael Hanczyc of the Institute of Physics and Chemistry and the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT) in Denmark, who has worked extensively on protocells.

“At this point it is a speculative design project but it is grounded in real science and it could be in production by 2050,” says Aden.

This is the third movie from the two-day Wearable Futures conference that explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.

In the first movie, designer of Dita von Teese’s 3D-printed gown Francis Bitonti explained how advances in design software mean “materials are becoming media”. In the second, Suzanne Lee explained how she makes clothes “grown using bacteria.”

The music featured in the movie is a track by DJ Kimon. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The post Synthetic materials can
“behave like living cells” appeared first on Dezeen.