Women's Wear Daily | Diana Eng | Talks at Google

I'm going to start with a brief introduction and then I'm going to hand it over to Diana where she can share some of her creations and discuss how she merges technology with fashion. Diana hopes to make the fashion minded more interested in the research process and the scientific minded more interested in fashion as a form of self expression. Diana holds a Bachelor's of Fine Arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design focused on apparel design. She also has researched biomimetics at the University of Bath in England and has collaborated with MIT on the Seamless Fashion Show. Eng is a repeat guest lecturer at the Florida Teachers Council of Mathematics, their annual conference where she lectures on the use of visual aids and hands on models, including origami and spiral laterals as teaching tools. Diana has been featured in Fashion Formula, in the Fashion Forward's Woman Wear Daily, but also on the COVID of I D magazine and Wired magazine. Diana is the contributor to Craft Magazine, the sister publication of make. And on top of that she has written her first book titled Create Wired Wearables and Geeky Gear. So that's going to be released in March of 2008. So stay tuned for that. You may know Diana best as a contestant on Project Runway Season 2. She also is the co creator of the 2006 Yahoo Hack Day winning project, the Blogging in Motion Purse which she brought with her today. So without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Diana. One quick disclaimer is she did not sign the NDA because of her company's restrictions. So I'm just responsible to make you all aware of that. Diana, welcome.

Hi everyone. I just wanted to start by saying that a lot of my projects would not have been possible without your lovely search engine. I have a fashion background with no background in electrical engineering or computer programming. So thanks to your search engine, I've been able to look up electronic schematics and kind of fake my programming skills by copying and pasting other people's code. Okay, so I'm going to kind of give you an overview of all of my projects and go through some of the concepts behind them along with the process. Thank you. Can you hear me better? Okay, so this first project is the inflatable dress and it is made almost completely out of duct tape and plastic tablecloths which are connected to a reversed handheld vacuum housed in a PVC pipe with some extra casing made by vacuum forming plastic like regular water bottles that are made out of plastic. So this was created with Emily Albinsky and it's an exploration of changing shape and silhouette. And here's a video of.

It's.

Okay. Next we have the heartbeat hoodie. And the idea behind this is that there's a camera at the top of your hoodie, and it's connected to a heart rate monitor. When your heart rate increases, it takes a photograph. The concept is that as you become excited about different things, your heart rate will increase. And so at the end of the day, you'll be able to look at all the photographs you've taken and kind of reflect on the things that have made you excited during the day. Now, the idea for the heartbeat hoodie came from this concept for body blogging. And body vlogging is where you would have a whole outfit that would have various sensors and GPS and perhaps moisture sensors or sound sensors in it. And these sensors would trigger devices which capture information. So this could be a microphone or a video camera, a regular digital camera or a gps. And within the garment, you might hear a loud noise, and then the garment would be triggered to capture the loud sound and would send automatically to your blog online. So you could hear all the loud sounds that you've heard at the end of the day kind of put together. Or it might record the GPS location where you heard all of the loud sounds. So you can kind of look back and reflect on all of the noisy places you visited throughout the day. There was sort of a prototype working, but I wound up having to rip out the basic stamp because I was a poor college student and couldn't afford a new one at the time. Okay. So someone was wondering if I would consider making the hoodie take a picture when the heartbeat stops, because recently there was a reporter from Japan in Burma, and it would be interesting to have a picture of him when the police shot him. Oh, so this is a sample webpage. Let's see. You would be able to capture on your webpage visual information through the photographs. You could also have the time that the picture was taken, the GPS location, tidbits of conversation, and perhaps you would be able to indicate your mood through a combination of moisture sensors and heart rate. Okay, next is biomimetic clothing. This is a combination of Tris, the Russian theory of inventive problem solving and biology. Basically, Tris was founded by a gentleman named Alt Schuller, and he worked at the patent office in Russia. And he was constantly seeing all of these new inventions, innovations come through his office, and he wondered if these inventions had anything in common. So he began writing a list of different principles, and he found that all inventions had 40 different principles in common. So he kind of reversed this and created triz, which is a method to create new innovation based on these different principles. Now, at the University of Beth, they were looking at a biological version of triz, because if you think about it, humans create things following certain methods, but nature will create the same things following different methods. And an example you might think about is a bird or a flying insect versus an airplane. So, you know, one is a lot larger, and they both have sort of different mechanics behind them. So I wanted to create a collection of convertible clothing. But the problem with convertible clothing is that it's usually very awkward to convert. So I wanted the clothing to convert with natural gestures and kind of, I guess, easier motions. So this is a first sketch of some designs, and these were based on the TRIZ principle of segmentation. So you can see the pairs of people. One of them will have the outfit one way, and then the other person has the outfit with a section of it unzipped. But the problem with segmentation is that after you unzip part of your alpha, you're going to be left with an extra piece. So this is kind of wasteful. You could lose the extra piece. It's very inconvenient. So the next set of sketches, an idea I was playing with, is anti weight. And this is where you have part of the garment and you release it and do the gravity, it'll fall down and create a. A new garment. But the problem with this is that it's very difficult to get the sort of initial position of the garment because after you've released it, you'll have to roll it back up. I guess it would just be very awkward. Okay. So lastly, I was looking at the idea of self service, and this is where a garment is going to transform based on your natural motion. So as you're walking along the. These garments are designed to open up more and kind of reveal different colors that are on the inside. So based on these three different principles and the sketches I made, I kind of edited out and created these three garments which transform in much more efficient ways. Let's see, they're just easier to transform. You don't have the extra pieces left over, and you don't have to go through a lot of work to put them back into their initial state. So here's a video of them transforming. So this one has a purse which transforms to become a wrap. And also the pants that she's wearing have slits on the sides. So when you're walking, they're designed to open up and reveal rich colors. And they have digital prints on the side of different things from nature. In this outfit, the shirt transforms to go from being a very open shirt to a sort of cowl neck. And then on the bottom there are a pair of culottes and you can open them up so that when she's walking and there's more motion, the culottes will open up and reveal the print underneath it. Okay. Lastly, with this one, the collar transforms to become the sleeves and the skirt at the bottom unwinds. So it goes from being a tight fitting, sort of pencil skirt silhouette to an asymmetrical silhouette. Okay. I also enjoy knitting in my spare time, so I like to knit things with number patterns because I found that they make more warm sort of pleasing visual patterns. And on these garments, the lace, which is the blue fringe on the side, is created with the Fibonacci number sequence. So it starts out with the smallest holes that are connected to the actual garment. Those start out with 1, 1, 2, 3. And then as it progresses to the outside part, the pattern is 5, 8 and 13. And this forms a natural ruffle. This project is called pupsight. It's a collaboration with Emily Albinsky. And the idea is that you can capture your dog's eye view of the world. So your dog would wear this special collar that has a camera in it. And when you're wondering what your dog is doing, you can call your dog on your cell phone and view a video of exactly what your dog is looking at. So this was made by hacking apart a Motorola home site kit. And you can see we just sort of pried the casing off and then made new housing for the electronics inside. And these are some of the videos. I thought it was really interesting because on the smaller and taller dogs, you can kind of see their gait while they're walking because the camera will bounce at different frequencies. Yes.

Recording of the videos based on the heart rated dog.

So someone just asked if you can trigger the recording of the videos based on the heart rate of the dog, which would be very interesting, but it might be difficult to get them to wear a heart rate monitor.

By the way, I already noticed that in Japan they developed a system called bowel engulfing.

Yes.

I was just saying that in Japan they've developed something called bilingual, which interprets your dog's bark and then transmits a message to you, I think over sms, telling you if it's happy, sad, hungry, angry, whatever. So you could integrate. That would be quite a cool.

So do you know if it was.

Very accurate or not, I've heard it's quite good. I mean, they've sold many millions in.

Japan to call them interesting. They also have a lingual.

Look it up.

Okay. They also have a dog collar in Japan you can purchase. So if you want this for your own dog, I think it just takes photographs, though. Okay, so last we have Bloggy in Motion, which was created with Emily Alvinsky, Audrey Roy, Jeannie Yang, Tara Kirchner, and Yahoo. Research Berkeley. And this was created for Yahoo. Hack Day. It's this purse over here. And when you walk, every time you walk 10 steps, it takes a photograph and automatically will send it to your blog online. There's also gps, which works occasionally. And we're hoping to create a map where you can see kind of like a map of where you've gone as well as the pictures with it. So I'm going to take a demo picture really quickly. Okay. We're going to wait a little while for it to upload. So this is a picture of the first prototype of the purse. You can see we took another bag and we kind of hacked it apart and created the electronics inside. You can see that there's a cell phone, and it's wired to a basic stamp, which is the part right beside the cell phone. And this is also connected to a pedometer. So the pedometer sends the signal to the basic stamp. The basic stamp counts how many steps you take, and then it triggers the cell phone through a relay. And here are some examples of different photographs that have been taken by the purse. It was at Maker Faire. It took a lot of really great pictures outside of all the happenings. And we will try to see if it has uploaded on the website. Hold on, let me find the browser. Oh, here we are. Okay. So are there any questions? Yes. What do you plan to do with all the designs? So someone just asked what I'm planning to do with the designs and if I'm going to go into commercial use of them. As of now, there aren't any plans to because there's a really big problem with production. Of course, these things are also very temperamental. So it would be horrible if someone were to buy it and never be able to get to work or couldn't get to work with their cell phone.

So what was the idea of using the pedometer in the bag as the trigger for the photos? What are the kinds of events that might be interesting to trigger on? And why did you choose the motion of walking as the key one?

Well, this device was just supposed to track your footsteps throughout the day. So essentially, we wanted it to be like, you could look at your blog at the end of the and trace back through your footsteps by looking at the picture. So the best way to literally do that would be to use a pedometer. But it also might be interesting to do it based on gps, because who knows, maybe you pace back and forth in your office a lot or something. Okay.

So what would be the cost of that bag if you were to go to production?

Well, I think the most expensive thing for that bag would be the cell phone plan, because it has an unlimited data plan, and you'd probably have to pay for a second phone plan for it. So that would probably come out to be about $50 a month. And then the actual bag might be something around $500 once you pay for the cell phone and the actual bag itself.

Because I can see it being very useful when I'm going hiking. So you go. You want to take all the pictures of what happened. You don't want to be bothered by actually stopping clicking.

Oh, yeah, that would be really neat. Also, you could get, if you're in the mountains, like an altitude GPS and see how high up and down you're going. Okay. Oh, yes. I just had a question about the heartbeat hoodie. Okay. Did you. Did you say that you did get it to work, or. It didn't really work that well, because I would need a very complex algorithm to figure out when your heart rate is increasing because you saw something interesting versus you being late and running somewhere. So it was just kind of a very, very rough prototype. Okay, well, thank you very much.