Pauline van Dongen
Pauline van Dongen is a Dutch fashion designer specialising in wearable technology. Within her studio that was established in 2010, she researches the concepts of change, movement, energy and perception, or the human body in relation to its surroundings. By adding new value and meaning to fashion with the use of technology, her work aims to naturalise technology to enhance human senses and experiences, and the way humans interact with their surroundings. Besides collaboration projects with a variety of partners, she carries out research, teaching and sales of her own designs.
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Suzi Webster
Suzi Webster is a researcher and a new media installation artist exploring the body-technology relationship, more specifically the ways in which technologies impact and shape human experiences. With more than a decade long background and experience with fashion-tech, she has been involved with education in the field, besides her work as a researcher and an artist. Her focus is on wearables, particularly on soft and flexible electronics that can be woven into textiles. The aim of her work is to investigate the intersections between art and design, fashion and technology, sculpture and performance, public and private, by creating work that is collaborative, responsive and dynamic.
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Kristi Kuusk is an Estonian designer and researcher who aims to find new ways to create more sustainable textiles and fashion by implementing technology, and focusing on the direction of crafting sustainable smart textile services. With a PhD in craft and sustainability qualities in smart textile services, her collaborative design projects have been presented at a variety of international exhibitions, shows and conferences. Among others, her projects have investigated topics such as sensing and actuating e-textiles for altering self-perception through the garment´s inside, and storytelling through traditional high-quality textiles and augmented reality. As an associate professor and researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts, her focus is on exploring the Textile Futures.
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Ricardo O´Nascimento/
Popkalab
Ricardo O´Nascimento is a Brazilian designer located in Rotterdam, Holland, who is investigating body-environment relationships, with a focus on developing interfaces for wearables, interactive installations and hybrid environments. He aims to transform the way humans communicate with each other and their surroundings to challenge and enhance human perception. Within his design research studio POPKALAB, he focuses on innovation of wearables, specialising on electronic textiles and reactive garments. The studio offers their partners and customers ideation sessions, prototype development and workshops for those interested in wearables on different levels.
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Anouk Wipprecht
Anouk Wipprecht is a Dutch designer and innovator working in the field of fashion-tech. Based between the USA and Amsterdam, her visually distinctive work focusses on ‘rethinking fashion in the age of digitisation’ to provoke a fashion experience that transcends mere appearance. Specifically, her distinctive design aesthetic, which combines fashion with engineering, robotics, science and interaction/user experience design – the latest in science and technology, seeks to augment the body/bodily interactions in the world in new ways. Her ‘Spider Dress’ for example, explores this notion through the use of sensors and a dynamic garment form that features arms that extend to simultaneously create a bold garment statement that shields the wearer with a physically defined boundary of personal space. ‘This robotic dress attacks when you come too close’ Wipprecht notes, thus offering a form of wearer augmentation and facilitation of interactions in a bespoke manner between the wearer and their surroundings.
Through partnering with companies such as INTEL, Autodesk, Google, Microsoft, AUDI, Swarovski, and 3D printing companies Materialise + Shapeways, Wipprecht researches and collaboratively develops how our future wardrobe would look as we continue to embed technology into what we wear.
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Jenny Tillotson
Jenny Tillotson is an award-winning UK-based design researcher and mental health campaigner. She has a degree in Fashion from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London and a PhD in Printed Textiles from the Royal College of Art (London). Her explorations into wearable technology and smell communication for health and wellbeing are viewed as pioneering in an expanding hybrid field where science, technology, fashion and scent intersect. She is founder of eScent® a low carbon wearable device which is capable of dispensing minute doses of perfume in response to a timer or acoustic or biometric stimulus for emotional regulation. Tillotson is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, a member of Cambridge Neuroscience, Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, an Associate of the British Society of Perfumers and a STEM Ambassador. She has exhibited her work internationally, published in biomedical and design journals and worked with industry including IFF, Philips, NIKE, Unilever, Cambridge Consultants, The North Face and Adeline André.
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