Last Thursday, I gave talks at CODAME Art + Tech Festival and Hackaday Supplyframe HDDG meetup on the opportunities and challenges in the current wearables industry, with a few demos of my tech-fashion designs. There are a few things I want to help solve and see happening in the garment and fashion business:
1. Applications of the latest technologies from tech companies to help advance the garment manufacturing processes;
2. Democratization of the garment manufacturing process and more creativity-driven production, so that creative designers can make their prototypes into products more directly;
3. Design tools highly integrated to fabrication tools to enable digitized designs from individuals to be produced at any volume, just like how 3D printing services are done;
4. Electronic components being a part of design and manufacturing elements;
5. Low-cost customization through standardization and modularization, so that wearable art and functional garments are affordable for anyone;
6. Made-to-order enabling waste reduction;
7. A more complete ecosystem – bridges between designers, open-source community, education and manufacturers and scaling from scientific research to industrial solutions.
Here is an article from Hackaday that summaries the talk and links to the livestream recording.
With the development of open-source hardware, fashion designers and creative technologists have started to include electronics as part of their designs, adding decorative and/or functional elements to garments. Driven by creative designs, the industry has tremendous opportunities but also faces significant challenges in scaling and scientific research. This talk gives an overview of the wearables industry with demos of programmable garments and discusses a few ideas for future development.
Art by Physicist Kitty Yeung 