From April 29 until 1st of May 2016 the Fashion Hack Day, a hackathon on fashion and tech, was taking place at FabLab in Berlin. 45 high carat participants and mentors from all over the world created in interdisciplinary teams of fashion designers and technologists the latest fashion tech prototypes within 48 hours and presented them with a catwalk.
13 edge cutting prototypes are pushing the boundaries of today´s functionality in fashion: garments alarm you if somebody isn´t respecting your personal space, garments exploring the extension of your body by muscle controlled tentacles which unfold, data gloves which transform touch into characters with an app reading it out loud, accessories which are inspired by the mating dance of paradise birds, smart and glowing necklaces, as well as wearable music accessories which serve as an interactive art performance, just to mention a few!
Impressions of the event weekend
There was a very creative, communicative, supportive and eager work atmosphere while having fun experimenting the latest tech in order to realize the ideas.
On Friday evening partners and mentors pitched the possibilities of using latest technology like 3D Printing, Laser Cutting, hacked knitting machines or e-textiles. And the participants pitched their ideas on future fashion and formed teams.
On Saturday morning several technology workshops were offered like 3D Modeling with Autodesk and SAP Hana Cloud Platform. Moreover the integration of technical components like sensors, microcontrollers, LEDs, conductive textiles as well as usage of the machines were explained. This gave the teams in depth knowledge, so they could work independently on the ideas. The atmosphere was very busy and concentrated and the hacking took place until late. There have been magical moments during the night with some stunning surprises next morning! On Sunday last details were finished up and the catwalk show was planned together.
The closing ceremony with a catwalk show took place at Kühlhaus Berlin, where 200 interested people joined to admire the newly created dresses! The atmosphere was buzzing of curiosity and surprise when the teams presented their prototypes live on stage!
The winning fashion tech prototype ...
Our winner teams “Knowledge is power” has been working on a dress, which is protecting women of sexual harassment. It registers assaults, sends the data to a cloud service, which then makes the crime scene location visible on a map. The dress shares the globally collected data in form of a light map that´s integrated in its design. The shared second place went to three teams: “Smoon” presented a new approach in digital jewelry, “Stethoscope” which morphs the sound of the universe with the sound of one´s own body and “Authi”, a T-shirt that translates the state of mind into a visual language that allows autistic children to understand their supervisor´s mood. Read more about the projects.
... and its potential as integrated IoT/Cloud use case
“The winning project “Knowledge is power”, about using data to protect women in public transport from sexual harassment has a lot of potential for an IoT/Cloud use case. The project proposed garments, which would allow women to easily report sexual harassment and use the data collect in the cloud to warn other women about dangerous areas. The collected data could also be used to highlight the problem to the public’s attention. I was very impressed with this project as it combines fashion and wearable technology to solve a very real problem which many women are unfortunately confronted with on a daily basis.” says Tobias Wieschnowsky, Senior Developer, SAP.
“I am impressed by the wide range and creativity of the ideas and the curiosity and fearlessness to experiment with new technology to realize a vision. Interdisciplinary skills are key for digital transformation and SAP University Alliances wants to enable the next generation on that.”
Anna Wypior
AFP News Agency have made a super nice video (In German) about Fashion Hack Day which was published also by Tagesspiegel, FAZ and others.
Further Impressions and a documentary video will be published soon on www.fashionhackday.com
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