openMaterials

The first edition of Botacon took place last weekend in Brooklyn. The lineup of speakers was impressive and made for one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. But one materials-related presentation stood out. Mr. Kim and John Sarik gave a talk titled “MakerBot Printable Transistors and OLEDs or I want to be Jeri Ellsworth [...]

Interesting article at The Japan Times :) TSUKUBA, Ibaraki Pref. (Kyodo) Researchers at the National Institute for Materials Science have found that an iron compound becomes superconductive — where electrical resistance disappears in a substance — if it is dipped in wine, sake or beer. “It is still not known what it is in sake that causes [...]

ghost dress grown from a vat of green tea Treehugger recently reported on BioCouture, a fashion research project based at Central Saint Martin’s College in London and led by Suzanna Lee, which seeks to grow textiles from a vat of liquid: The process uses a sugary green tea recipe, to which, a bacterial culture is added. It [...]

I keep thinking that even though we tend to use conductive fabric and other soft circuits materials mostly for wearables and such, there has to be much more to it than that. Ayman’s drumsticks are a great of example of other interesting applications for these materials. He made them for his iPad iSteelPan application, but [...]

Last March I had the opportunity to teach an openMaterials workshop at the very special École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence (France). It was part of a larger event in which the school invited researchers and artists from several fields to lead a one week class for 2nd year art students. The goal was to show [...]

I’ve learned that there are 3 main challenges in working with soft circuits. The first one is to create circuitry with materials that are almost always completely exposed: a lot of thought goes into the layout of the circuit to not only avoid accidental shorts during normal wear, but also to avoid crisscrosses between conductive [...]