openMaterials

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 [...]

OSLOOM is is a project led by Margarita Benitez aimed at creating an open source electromechanical thread-controlled loom that will be computer controlled. It will include basic software allowing anyone to simply weave a photo thru a web browser (twill/satin), import weave ready files from other software (such as Bhakti/Alice photoshop method), and then post [...]

This mitten lights up when its wearer shakes hands with someone. It has two exposed soft contacts around the thumb and across the palm which, when bridged by bare skin, turn on the LED embedded on the flower. The mitten itself was created by fashion designer Isabel Tomás, and we then sewed a simple touch [...]