Design of 'smart' fashion garments

I researched and designed ‘smart’ fashion garments incorporating new technologies and electronics in wearable computing.

Deploying contextual workshop research into the potential future functionality of wearable computing in clothing and critical ideas in new media in the territory where art, science and technology meet on the body. The garments were designed for a context specific performance to incorporate input and output devices, wireless LAN activated responsive environments and combined, audio, video and choreography, textiles substrates as user-aware devices using sensors and responsive actuators to communicate digitally-mediated emotions and recognize signals and identity presence in the periphery of human awareness through biometric data, e.g body heat or voice recognition, or password identity.
For example, I formulated and illustrated the Cinderella AIDD (Artificial Intelligence Dating Device.) The AIDD contains an RFID tag with the wearer's personal information and dating preferences, a wireless reader programmed to match-make data from others tags to use AI profiling to scope potential suitable partners. An alert is sent when promising suitors approach. The wearer can leave a smart "slipper card" behind with his or her new acquaintance. The card encrypts a data profile for use in romantic follow-up, including a GPS locator. This gizmo is indicative of my ongoing practice-based research into visualising fashion/science technologies.

Sue Jenkyn-Jones
Research Interests
Virtual bodies, avatars and garments, computer wearables, film, animation and fashion for dance, shopping technologies, CAD/CAM for knitwear.
Current Research
My research and practice fuses the development of new technologies in clothing manufacture and the virtual visualisation of fabric, fashion and accessories. Outcomes have included innovative fabrics, and virtual CAD/CAM output, wearables and animations, shown at the Banff, New Media Institute, Canada 2004, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York (CAD'Infinitum Jan. 2000) and the Design Museum Sweden, Mälmo, (Textiles, Techniques and Technologies) June 2001.I am interested in shopping technologies and applications for mobile and embedded technology for consumer interaction in retail and performance environments.
Between 2002 and 2004 I led a series of workshops and projects hosted by Central Saint Martins for an EU 1st project consortium co-ordinated by EURATEX called Fashion-Online, established to benchmark 2D sales aids and 3D body-scanning technologies and interfaces for fashion websites for both B2B and B2C. This work continues with a mass-customisation project SERVIVE, to begin 2008.
In 2002 I published a handbook for school leavers and aspiring fashion designers 'Fashion Design' now in its second edition (Laurence King Publishers ISBN 1-85669-245-0), and in 2008 will launch a visual guide to Digital Fashion.