Home > IT in Textiles > Story

Clothing that changes colour to match your mood

Information technology, it appears, is finally leaving its hard plastic box. Display technology will eventually be all around us, even painted on walls and ceilings. And personal technology will be woven into our clothing.

‘First generation’ textiles refer to one of humanity’s early technologies, the spinning and weaving of natural fibres. ‘Second generation textiles’ were developed as alternatives to natural fibres and include synthetic, petroleum-based fibres like nylon, polyester and polypropylene. Most recently, we have moved towards ‘third generation’ textiles, enabled by the latest advances in material and biological sciences, nanotechnology and intelligent systems.

Most often researched and applied in biomedical and military contexts, the resulting technologies include intelligent fibres, interactive textiles or smart fabrics. Biomedical applications include artificial skin and bio-prosthetic limbs and organs, while military applications include protective clothing and gear for combat soldiers. Concurrently, media artists are applying these, and similar technologies, to create intimate and sensual computer-mediated experiences.

Clothing that changes colour to match your mood

In his latest column for Business 2.0, "Wearable Tech," Rafe Needleman tells us that clothes that can change colors electronically are soon coming to our closets.

In 2001 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency jump-started a project to accelerate the development of electronic textiles. It’s looking for, among other things, military uniforms that can adapt to different environments, providing on-the-fly camouflage for soldiers. One of the beneficiaries of the DARPA project is International Fashion Machines (IFM), which was founded by Maggie Orth to do fundamental research in this field. As part of her early research, Orth developed textiles for hanging (not wearable) artworks. "I was trying to make technology into something beautiful," she says.

The world in which clothing, paint, lighting, rugs, and curtains all change colors to match (or influence) our mood is coming, but it’s some time away - a lot of technology has to be made affordable and durable before then. In the meantime, IFM and other companies are working on ways to weave touch sensors into fabrics. Orth built a musical jacket with a small keyboard woven into the sleeve.

For her PhD Dissertation work at the MIT Media Lab, Maggie Orth astutely reminds us that: "There are no physical computing materials that artists and designers can plastically shape, directly manipulate, and that allow them to investigate the artistic relationship of physical form and computation" (55). "[To] explore physical form and computation the plastically shapeable materials of computing objects, or design materials, must become computationally active. As real, physical and tactile media, physical computing materials must also develop tactile and sensual qualities that virtual media do not possess".

She distinguishes between raw, structured and pre-fabricated materials. Raw materials: have no predefined shape; are usually highly shapeable (high plastic control); and their properties do not change if the material is broken or reshaped. Structured materials: are directly flexible and bendable in some orientation; but cannot be reshaped or resized except through a remote design process (like CAD).

Pre-fabricated materials: are assembled from other materials and used as part of a larger object; and are composites that cannot be randomly resized or physically reshaped without losing their fundamental material properties (they stop working). "The additive design process of industrial and product design cannot be equated with sculptural assemblage. In sculptural assemblage, objects and materials are purposefully taken out of context to create new meaning. In traditional industrial design and product design, an assembled group of standard computational materials does not behave in an active symbolic manner. It simply repeats and reinforces the expected meaning and role of computers and technology".

Challenging traditional notions of wearable computing, Orth created electronic dresses and embroidered musical instruments - interactive cloth music machines - and went on to co-found International Fashion Machines (IFM). The corporate web site states: "As an MIT Media Lab startup, IFM possesses high levels of expertise in wearable computing, smart and electronic textiles, expressive software, materials, electronics, the latest computer and micro technology, sensing, graphic design, interaction design and industrial design.

This highly unusual combination of skills, as well as our intellectual property [patents] in smart textiles, makes us uniquely qualified to transform new and existing technologies into beautiful, practical and innovative consumer products for the fashion and design industries (http://www.ifmachines.com).

Orth’s textile technologies are certainly physically intimate as well as genuinely ‘wearable’. They can be seen and touched, and they react to (emerge from?) our embodied presence and movement. The computing element is rendered invisible; it metonymically substitutes its intangible interior(ity) for the ‘real’ exterior of cloth. Orth’s computing devices suggest (are?) us (our bodies and spirits) at play.