[MUSIC PLAYING]
BECKY STERN: Having technology on you, around you, inside you
24/7 is going to be totally commonplace.
STEVEN DEAN: We're looking for new technologies and new ways
of knowing ourselves.
SABINE SEYMOUR: I'm a strong believer
that garments can do the same thing our actual skin does.
SANDY PENTLAND: We just have a little awareness
of what's going on in the cyber side of you.
It's hard to know where they'll all go,
but it's certainly going to be an interesting journey.
Wearable technology is just augmenting
your awareness of things without getting in the way.
We explored the whole idea of wearable technology back
in the early '90s.
And Thad Starner was one of my students.
He's the one that went on to produce Google Glass.
What we found is that why should you disrupt social interactions
when you could just have ambient awareness?
Consider the history of the pocket watch.
Originally, watches were just these things
that you had on the wall or the big clock tower.
And then, people began making them small
and putting them in their pocket.
That idea spread and that's how the wristwatch was born.
It was nice to just have this awareness.
And that's the idea behind things like Google Glass.
It's not something that disrupts the social interaction,
but these things can add a little to it, right?
They can annotate it.
They can augment it.
Really, it's a very social technology.
SABINE SEYMOUR: Anything you wear
on the body as a second skin-- today,
wearable technology is embedded into something,
whereas long-term, you really have to think about,
how do you make the fabric itself smart?
For example, think about a garment you don't have to wash.
They can change their shape, their color,
fabrics that have a metallic coating
or yarns that are conductive.
We want to make the actual fiber smart so
that through nanotechnology, we can create
a textile that can sense.
To me, garments are the node of a digital system.
So imagine that everything we wear
becomes part of a digital environment, a digital network.
STEVEN DEAN: I am very excited to see the design community
coming to health care and building better devices, better
sensors, things which people would want to wear.
Being able to track or sense or measure,
we can start to look at actual numbers
about the current state of our body.
I'm going to use a sleep example.
I had suspected that I was getting
interrupted at nighttime.
And so I purchased a headband that you wear
and it measures brain activity.
And come to find out, I was waking up four or five times
a night and it was taking on average about 20 to 30 minutes
for me to go back to sleep.
I concluded that I was losing about two hours of sleep
a night and really made a discovery.
I lived in a very commercial neighborhood
and the noise of removing trash at night was waking me up.
So I moved.
What we're particularly interested in
is the intervention part.
How can we then take the data that these sensors
and these devices are giving us and then act upon it?
BECKY STERN: We're really interested in moving the DIY
wearables movement forward.
Being able to make something yourself is very empowering.
So I'll make a project and a project video
and tutorial every single week using conductive fabric,
conductive thread, and provide you with a sample project
with source code to get viewers out there able to make
these things themselves.
One of the projects we made is a light-up necktie
with multicolored LEDs along the line of it
and a little microphone at the top.
And when you talk or when there's music playing,
it acts kind of like a little volume meter.
But there's also very practical things.
We made a sew-able GPS unit that you can put into a jacket
and have your jacket either help you
find your way to your destination,
alert you when you're there.
Also made a backpack that has LED turn signals and brake
lights for your motorcycle.
Recently, we did a tutorial about making a big old ribbon
hair bow.
It's just two LEDs and a battery.
I like doing simple projects like that
that can get especially little girls really interested
in making their own electronics.
Without open source hardware, people
wouldn't be able to freely take other people's resources
and learn from them and then investigate and create
their own new extensions or modifications.
If you're going to wear something that's
encrusted in LEDs, wouldn't you'd
love to be able to say, yeah, I made this, instead of, yeah,
I bought it for however many thousands of dollars?
SABINE SEYMOUR: I'm a very, very strong believer
that garments can do more.
We can do many things.
STEVEN DEAN: The more that we instrument our body,
the more that we can know about this complex machine
that we have, the better we will be.
BECKY STERN: Wearable tech from where I come from
is very different.
Instead of just buy, buy, buy, I want the thing with the newest
features, you're dreaming up those features yourself
and you're thinking about how you can make them a reality.
SANDY PENTLAND: Really, the whole society
is made up of humans and computers interacting
with each other.
That's cyborg, I'm sorry.
[MUSIC PLAYING]