Wearables

The Culture Dress – Experiments during Makers in Residence

“The Culture Dress” series is a collaboration between media artist Afroditi Psarra and architect Dafni Papadopoulou that aims to combine electronic handicrafts with parametric design and digital fabrication on an ongoing research on wearables. The project was developed during the Maker-In-Residence program at WeMake, Milan´s Makerspace that I’m curating. Dafni and Afroditi spent with us two weeks in our guest-room at the second floor of the makerspace. I’ve been following the work of Afroditi for a couple of years and it was great to have her with us, meet with Dafni and make our community know about their practise. Explore more pics and other documentation: wemake.cc/mir/  

Participate to Reshape15 – Wearable Technology Competition

I was invited to be part of the Jury to evaluate the submissions for the Wearable Technology Competition together with Ronen Kadushin, Alessio Erioli, Anastasia Pistofidou, Elizabeth E. Fraguada, Niccolò Casas, Martìn Rodriguez Montoya. Read the brief and get ready to participate (submissions deadline 31st May 2015) Reshape focuses on the definition of this language, proposing a new challenge to makers and designers: RESHAPE15 | wearable technology competition. Proposals will focus on the possibilities of wearable technology without any design limitation. Once again Reshape leaves to designers freedom and responsibility of their own choices. Nonetheless, all submissions must reflect the mission of Reshape: merging ideas with fabrication processes and market viabilities. Fabrication strategies must be clear and reasonable, demonstrating a real control of the production process. The distributed network of fabrication of Reshape includes Fab Labs and Maker Space, all equipped with digital fabrication machines such as laser cutters, 3d printers, milling machines and robotic arms. Entries are required to rely on those machines as

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Empowering Users through Design – book

I’m happy to announce that, together with Serena Cangiano, I contributed to the book  Empowering Users through Design  – Springer – with a chapter called: Open Sourcing Wearables: the Impact of Open Technologies and User Engagement in the Design of Body-Borne Interactive Products. Here’s the Abstract of the chapter: Wearable technology is the “next big thing” in tech industries. Analysts forecast a consistent growth and this sector is becoming appealing to many corporations. Aim of this chapter is to present the field of wearable technology and to highlight unexplored issues generated by the relation of such technologies with the domain of proprietary versus open source businesses. If wearable technologies sell the promise of an augmented self by providing access to bio data, we can witness the emerging of a contradictory scenario: while we acquire knowledge about our bio-self through body borne devices, we also feed voluntarily a powerful data stream whose commodifcation and, subsequent marketability, represents the core element of the current

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