Digital Skin: The Convergence of Fashion, Design, and Technology

The multi-year collaboration between MIT and Hussein Chalayan brings together the worlds of fashion, design, and technology.
For decades, fashion designer Hussein Chalayan has been pioneering the use of interactive, kinetic, and transformable fashion in his studio and on runways around the world. Simultaneously, Skylar Tibbits’s MIT Self-Assembly Lab and various other researchers around the world have recently made a number of advances in materials and fabrication that enable a field of highly active and programmable materials that can sense and actuate based on embedded logic.
Exploring the notion of an interactive and sensory digital skin as a fabric or material surface which can detect and respond to environmental, physical, and physiological stimuli, the interdisciplinary collaboration produced a studio course and launched a research project.
The Digital Skin studio was first offered in fall 2021 at MIT and Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (HTW) - Modedesign, Berlin (University of Applied Sciences, Fashion Design). A conceptual and experimental vehicle, the course prompted students to imagine, design, and create projects materializing their unique perspective on ‘interactive intelligent skin.’
This begs the question-can we now create truly intelligent materials that go beyond a sense/response behavior towards seamless human interaction, embodied intelligence, and even form their own materially creative expression?
For more information, visit arts.mit.edu/digital-skin

[@JudgeFredd]

Great