The Innovator of Intelligent Couture

I’m a Dutch ‘FashionTech’ Designer. This means I do things with electronics and design around the body. Working with new tech and pushing the boundaries of electronics or hardware. I work alone, or collaborate. I do design, coding, engineering, and manufacturing of my projects. Sometimes I sew, another day I solder or code. It’s a very fun process.

I use 3D printing to host my electronics. It’s always important that electronic components are well-protected, and when you work with wearable electronics, even if you have big motoric things on the body that you need to stabilize, it’s important that they’re comfortable to wear. A big part of my work is product design, or helping companies get into technology from the fashion side.

But also thinking of the new generation growing up in a technological enhanced world, therefore I like inspiring more kids (and especially – more girls) into technology through talks at schools or hands-on workshops. Since they will be the end-user of the interfaces that currently are being created.

Basically, it’s connecting technology to the body through fashion. Interaction design is a really important part of it. If and when we put technology on the body – what does it do? Other than blinking or bleeping. How can it help or support us? Give us a little signal when we are stressed out, to calm down? Or show our colleagues that we are in a high focus state, so they don’t interrupt us? And what would that do to our productivity, or emotional life?

But also from a broader sense: looking at the things we wear, how do they interact with ourselves, our surroundings, the people around us, our larger communities, the buildings we live in or the spaces we visit? How can it interact with yourself, or the space or people around you?

My ‘HeartBeat Dress’ shows the heartbeat of the wearer: something very personal and intimate, showing that to the outside world, is both poetic. But also frightening. It explores the realms of showing our emotions. And both the poetics as also the complications that comes with it: because, if you wear your heart(beat) on your sleeve: would this help you, or make you more self aware?

Well, that we can have more emotionally-steered design around us, so that garments, facades, or places we walk through can be more sensitive to our needs. Technology came into the world to help us, but at this point, it overwhelms us and occupies us in ways that are not quite healthy.

So I’m interested in this idea of how we can reconnect to ourselves, to our larger community, to the world around us through these technologies.

If you have technology living on the body, it can sense you, it can get to know you. So where does that take us, in good ways and in bad ways?    

I think the spider dress project is the most compelling because from the robotics side the system has multiple degrees of freedom, so you can do a lot of animation with it. It measures where people are in space, so it’s an intelligent system. But it’s also a message about protecting our personal space, as it literally shields the wearer from intruders. So that’s an important design series for me. There are two dresses now (the first, black version based on the game Limbo, and a white version created with Intel and Philip Wilck) and I’m busy making a third version. While it’s fun for me to make new designs, sometimes it’s also fun to revise old designs when I discover new technologies.

Another thing that really excited me is the field of Neuroscience, and connecting EEG / brain signals over BCI’s (Brain Computer Interfaces) to electronic fashion. It’s a field I got into around 10 years ago and ever since I have been doing around 3 projects around it. Brain signals is really interesting to trace back certain focus states, measuring workload, or even reactivity, or certain kinds of emotions. My ‘Agent Unicorn’ project is centered around kids with ADHD, while my ‘Pangolin Dress’ and ‘Screen Dress’ show the complexity of brain signals through interactions within the dress.

I wasn’t a specialist in Neuroscience when I started to look into working with brain signals as it was just a hobby, but over time, reading books, attending conferences, collaborations, and working with measuring brain signals and technologies around it, you become a bit of a specialist in the use of neurotech, and then projects evolve out of that. That is the fun thing about this, that excites me.

If I’m doing a collaboration with a fellow designer, technologist or an architect, it’s about camaraderie and having the same vision or ideas about things, because that just makes things flow. It is both exciting as also daring when a design partner comes from a different background. I always like that, it creates contrast. That is why I am always supporting interdisciplinary studies when educating.

One of my favorite collaborators is Niccolo Casas. Not because we are the same, but because we are different. He comes from the architecture side (big scale, buildings and facades) while I come from the fashion side (small scale, the body) and that creates a lot of interesting questions around the body and the spaces around them. Another fun thing is working with performance artists or pop artists, since they use a stage as their medium. I worked a lot with Viktoria Modesta, a bionic pop artist. She has a prosthetic leg, so we work a lot of putting cool electronics in legs that we design together, that then is being used during stage shows or campaigns.

From a client side, it’s different. You need to have the same mindset. Cigarette companies always used to come to me because I have a smoke dress so they want to do something with that. But that’s not the vibe that I want to have nor the ethos of a product I want to work with. When you’re collaborating with someone else, you always need to check with yourself and ask if you have the same message in mind. Smoking is not something I like to support in that case.

Audi was really cool because their whole team was female. At a car show, you always have the cars and then the sexy girl hovering over the car. And it’s all cheesy, cliché, you know. So we were like, okay, let’s not do that.

We worked with female models who were really strong and almost masculine standing in the show. It was very powerful. Those statements are interesting to make because it’s disturbing the field, but it’s also saying, hey, why are you doing this? Let’s regroup. Let’s demonstate a powerful look, instead of an sexist one.

So with a company, I always look at how my presence can help push out some of these more futuristic ideas. Working with artists is good for them because from a corporate view, the brands sometimes cannot necessarily push out a provocativestatement, but they can team up with an artist that has a similar vision or ideas.

The best kind of partnership is a person, a brand, or a company, that is on the same mindset with you. So you can elevate the experience you build together the best way. If things are ‘off’ a collaboration might be too forced. A good collaboration is where things seamlessly fit together I think.

In a design process, it’s like playing ping pong. You have the ball and ping it to the other, and that brings it back. It’s a constant back and forth untill you reach the right amount of design vs interaction. It can be very playful. And that is the fun thing about that I think. Finding together a sweet spot within an interesting project.

The vibe that they give. It can make you feel cuddly, it can make you feel more of a hard vibe. The set of samples you sent has a lot of examples of playing with different colors. Some are more cozy, and others are a little more distant. And it’s cool that you can do that with materials and textures.

Texture is all about psychology, right? You see something, you’re like, oh, that will feel so soft. But when you touch it, it’s actually not. You can also fool people a little bit, which I think is interesting in regard to material.

There are a lot of companies that do 3D printing on fabrics. But often, it’s still a little bit hard and it’s definitely not washable. And what I’m looking at is the fabric being washable, but also being able to place the electronics in there.

What I would be excited for is if we’re able to 3D print using shape memory alloys, the internal flexional kind of stuff. If we’re able to 3D print with that, you could do really cool things using robotics, because you could print certain shapes with different states, right? Because of the high heat factor and all of that stuff, there’s a lot of problems. But as soon as that comes out, a lot of really interesting things will happen in the field of engineering.

Creating intimacy, especially in big spaces, is always quite interesting. If you look at it from that perspective, it gives people a one-to-one experience with the design. For a bigger experience, it could be having structures that are sensoric, so you can make sounds by adding really small perforations. Then you’re walking past a sign and the speaker is already integrated. So you can do interesting things by making things more sensorial, intuitive, or adapting that environment.

It’s all about consistency. If you look at my designs, it’s like one family, but they’re all coming from different projects. So I think it’s consistency in your work ethic, the relationships that you build, and the work you do, and staying consistent to certain techniques while opening up to the experiments on the other side.

In the end, I think whether you’re an artist or an engineer or a painter or whatever, you always want to make the world weirder or prettier or whatever you have. And that’s why we are here. So if you have some ideas, try to work them out and deep dive into that. In the end, it’ll be the signature that other people will feel connected to.

So, consistently follow your passion and keep educating yourself on topics, whether that’s technology or software or hardware. Never stop exploring because as soon as you do that, then you’re not an innovator.