Hasta La Creative!

If you're disgusted by the nude human body, this video's probably not for you. If you're disgusted by your own nude body, then this video most certainly is for you.

London agency Man+Hatchet spent five days holed up in Estonia with 100 nude people to create the compelling stop-motion clip below. The client is Withings, a creator of digital health products like blood pressure monitors and weight scales. 

It would be easy for a brand like that to guilt you into seeking bodily perfection, so it's nice to see a spot that instead tells you to first take pride in yourself, and self-improvement will follow.

Warning: This video features artistic nudity and probably isn't safe for work.

Another project from the RCA Design Interactions show. This one made me laugh so much:

In wealthier neighbourhoods, the size of the house and how well maintained the garden is, often represents status.

The Grass Scanner is a device designed by Alice Wang to measure how green the grass is. Using 3 Pantone Color Cue devices, it takes reading from 3 random patches of the grass and outputs a Pantone colour code for one to compare. With the codes, one can refer to the PARKTONE cards which contains average grass colours of Royal Parks and other green areas in the UK for people to match up with their own garden.

As grass condition in different areas of a given park may vary, each area was measured several times before an average of the data was used to create the PARKTONE card.

Relate: Mugs for a perfect tea.

Fashionable Technology: The Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science and Technology, by Sabine Seymour (Amazon UK and USA.)

Published by Springer, abstract: The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, wearables for short, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a compact survey of the theory involved and an explanation of the role technology plays in a fabric or article of clothing. The practical application is explained in detail and numerous illustrations serve as clarification. Over 50 well-known designers, research institutes, companies and artists, among them Philips, Burton, MIT Media Lab, XS Labs, New York University, Hussein Chalayan, Cute Circuit or International Fashion Machines are introduced by means of their latest, often still unpublished, project, and a survey of their work to date. Given for the first time is a list of all the relevant information on research institutes, materials, publications etc. A must for all those wishing to know everything about fashionable technology.

Lags, a series of patches for coping with social jet lag, by Teresa Almeida

The book contains only 15 pages of theoretical discourse. It might not sound like a lot but they have the virtue of going straight to the point. Sabine Seymour knows what she’s writing about. Because the Vienna slash New York-based designer and researcher has spent several years dedicating her energy and brain to the exploration of what the next generation wearables would bring, she can see beyond the hype and detect what is truly inspiring or meaningful design-wise. Mondial Inc is a commercial entity born from her research and her role as an educator. She has lectured and exhibited her work internationally and she’s currently a faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design in New York and the University of Arts and Industiral Desin in Linz, Austria.

Taiknam Hat, by Ricardo Nascimento, Ebru Kurbak and Fabiana Shizue, reacts to medium wave radio signals

The theoretical intro covers briefly the history of wearable computing, comments on the technology used to enable garments to interact, underlines textile innovations, adds some design considerations in the process, etc.

Space invader knitting by Be-Geistert

After the intro, there’s just a magnificent show and tell of some of the latest (a number of them haven’t been published anywhere else) and most interesting techno-fashion projects. You’ll find the big names of the industry (phillips, Nike, Adidas) but also pioneering and fearless fashion designers (Hussein Chalayan), the explorers of poetical fashion (Ying Gao), the young stars (CuteCircuit), the makers of fermented dresses (Donna Franklin), the always elegant (Despina Papadopoulos), the unclassifiable Kate Hartman), the lady ready for the catwalk in outer space (Kouji Hikawa), the geeky knitters (Cat Mazza, Ebru Kurbak & Mahir Yavuz), etc.

Kouji Hikawa‘s Space Suit and Cooling Pants

The book won’t tell you everything you dream to know about fashion and technology, how to make a singing skirt or used nanotech in your next project, but it will definitively enable you to have an idea of the breadth and scope of the discipline. Besides it demosntrates that techno-fashion designers have gone a long way since the time “wearable technology” consisted of a keyboard roughly distributed over the body.

There are many books about fashion and technology but this one is truly unique. It’s engaging, intelligent and it will make you smile and inspire as you turn the pages over. Besides, it makes a fantastic resource for students and anyone interested in the subject. There’s a bibliography, a glossary of innovative materials, a list of blogs and websites but also events and institutes which will enable readers to dig further into the subject.

Textile XY by Maurin Donneaud

The book was launched last Thursday in New York. Phil Torrone from Make magazine was there. Just for info, Ulrike Reinhard had a chance to video one of Sabine’s presentation a while ago.
Image on the homepage is Diana Eng and Emily Albinski’s Inflatable wedding dress.