Smart textile designer creates standard devices

Dan Rogers - 24 Feb 2010

A smart textile clothing designer in the US is creating an integration kit to make the addition of electronic functionality easier for fashion designers.

New York-based Studio 5050 is planning to have a kit ready later in 2010.

Despina Papadopoulos, founder of Studio 5050, explains: 'We hope that it will make design more intuitive, so it will become a case of playing around with these devices.

'We're working on a set of prototyping tools. The user will be able to apply them, in order to test them, and we will then begin to refine the kit. This should take around a year.'

The kit will be based on making functions such as lighting and sensing easier to integrate into clothing, with connectors, batteries and LED modules amongst the components currently being developed.

Supply

A number of designers are experimenting with the possibilities offered by smart textiles in a fashion application, but efforts are limited by the lack of ready-made devices and materials that can be ordered.

Papadopoulos says: 'Until systems can be applied into a production run very easily, you won't see changes in textiles - unless we see them in cottage industries, where short runs can be done, or even hand-made.'

Studio 5050 has produced a number of commercially available smart textile clothes, but has previously had to develop its own materials and integration techniques to make these products possible.

Progress in making smart textiles that can survive wearing and washing is an area being addressed by developers such as Interactive Wear and the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany.

Practical fabrics

However, even functional fabrics - usually made for practical applications such as military use or healthcare garments - can lack the comfort, aesthetic appeal and versatility to be transferred to fashion. Papadopoulos found this in some of the early work of US smart textile developer Textronics (now part of Adidas) - though she adds that, overall, their work is 'great' - and notes that a number of developers do not initially pay enough attention to the fashionable integration of electronics into clothing.

She comments: 'If a designer puts a black, hard plastic box into the sleeve, it's no use. There's no reason why this couldn't be a soft, silicon, coloured box, rather than being like a plug-in pacemaker. Such devices are clearly well engineered, but from a design perspective it's a bit of a 'whoops' moment, as it's too late to change it.'

 

+Plastic Electronics has previously reported on some of the issues around making an e-textile that also functions well as a fabric. Kunigunde Cherenack, a researcher on the TecInTex project to develop sensing clothing for hospital patients in Switzerland, noted that weaving flexible, conductive fabrics was proving a problem.

Cherenack noted: 'The textile industry is extremely critical of many materials that are termed "smart textiles" - they say that they do not drape properly and are not smooth or soft enough to be proper textiles.'