After a full day of lectures and yoga I attended a talk by Scott Summit from http://www.summitid.com. I was wowed by the beautiful 3D printed prosthetics for amputees. The limbs are created by scanning a person's un-injured body part and then that data is used to print a highly personalized prosthetic limb. Talk about on-demand body parts! 

Published on Technorati, May 11, 2010

How many times have you used a pattern, a recipe, or done a craft and changed a couple of the ingredients or the materials to suit you needs? Well, it's no different with hardware.

This year I am honored to be presenting a workshop and talk at the Smart Fabrics conference in Miami, FL. Smart Fabrics is THE premier event for everyone interested in applications, marketing, design, development, curation, and manufacturing of smart or advanced textiles. Smart fabrics are textiles that are woven or embedded with advanced properties. Examples are sports bras that can detect your heart rate, solar energy gathering pants, and soft switches for controlling your MP3 player from your jacket. There are many more amazing sci-fi sounding applications being developed, who says we have to wait for the future? It seems to me the future is now. 

Smart Fabrics 2010

April 14 - 16 in Miami, Florida

Conrad Miami Hotel

Register Here

[Above: Syuzi and Alison meeting for the first time at Maker Faire in 2006]

After four years, Syuzi Pakhchyan and I were finally able to get together and host our own talk about girls in technology. The talk was called “Duh… Its Like Tech for Girls <3" and it was presented as a core converation at SXSW Interactive 2010. We were joined by many audience members, who were passionate about igniting that tech spark in girls, teens, and women.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Ada (seen above in a lovely lace gown) wrote the world’s first computer programs for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine invented by, Charles Babbage - Way to go Ada!

I am celebrating this day by writing about one of my favorite women in technology, Jerrie Cobb (above posing next to the Mercury spaceship capsule) . Jerrie was the first woman picked to undergo the grueling astronautical space tests in 1960 to become an astronaut, but was never allowed to take flight into space simply because of her gender.

Wow, not only did Canada kick our butts on the ice, they are doing it in Fashion Technology too. Don’t believe me, take a look at these gorgeous lighted fabrics and this dress from Karma Chameleon.

(Above: one of Spiral Magazine's Animated Avatars by Designers Reed + Rader)

Augmented Reality or AR is a term for for "a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery - creating a mixed reality."

"Everything has an end. The cycle of life is a positive thing because it gives room for new things to come." - McQueen

It has been almost two weeks since I learned about Alexander McQueen's tragic suicide. When it happened, I didn't want to blog about it because it felt too personal and deeply depressing. For me, iHeartSwitch is about moving forward with technology in a positive light, not mourning the past. But sometimes, you have to acknowledge and share your pain in order to move past it. I am lucky enough to have a venue to do that and I know many of you were also deeply shocked and hurt by his passing as well, so you won’t mind if I get a little personal.

The "Klight" dress is designed by Mareike Michel, a fashion design student at the University of Applied Science in Berlin, Germany. What makes this demure LBD so special is the stretchable PCB. For those who don't know, a PCB stands for "printed circuit board" and they are the boards that hold and connect the main components of a computerized system like you find inside your cellphone, computer, and other electronic devices (see below). They are very hard and inflexible and usually difficult to integrate into fabric unless your looking for something with real rigidity. However, with a STELLA, we are looking at a possible future with washable and comfortable interactive fashion and interior design. 

A common PCB (Left) is found in most all electronic devices today. The Knight dress with the stretchable PCB (on the right) was developed in cooperation with scientists from Fraunhofer IZM and TU Berlin as part of the European research project STELLA (STretchable ELectronics for Large Area Applications).

With the advancement of a new micro solar cell, sequined dresses of the future may not just indicate a fashionista on the loose, but instead, an environmentally conscious go-getter with a fully charged cell phone.

The scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, makers of all things sci-fi, have created tiny snow-flake looking solar cells (pictured below) for possible applications in textiles and clothing. These cells are being designed to be less expensive and have greater electronic efficiencies than the current cells on the market. The micro cells require cutting edge manufacturing techniques to ensure quality. Even so, their miniscule size makes it so that there is a minimal loss of power production if one were to be damaged. Compare this to today’s large rectangular solar panels, where if one goes down, the whole unit has a huge loss in power production. Instead with these new cells if one went down it would just be a small percentage of the overall grid.

This is defiantly a technology to watch. I see a future of sparkling rooftops, glittering light poles, and fashionable sequined shrugs. What do you see? What would you make with solar powered sequins? Leave a comment and let us know.

Source: Inhabitat

Dress image from stellarmagazine