Innovation Meets Fashion

With all the reports and talk about job loss and the "sky is falling" scenarios these two stories give me hope about our future and remind me that it's not the government or the multi-national businesses alone that drive our economy, its the independent thinkers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and immigrants that create change. That is why I selected two stories on innovation from the Christian Science Monitor

The first story focuses on how the game of football has and can change as a result of new technology. "According to some inventors technology can make the game faster, more fair, and less dangerous for players."

TV viewers are already familiar with seeing the laser beams, the electronic version of the sticks and chains, how about a goal post that lights up when a touchdown is made, or a ball with a tracking device (imagine what that would do to point spreads and betting).

Other sports, baseball, hockey and basketball are also testing new technologies to improve their games, but who would have thought basketball would have something in common with fashion. In Australia a team is testing uniforms that display game information on small panels sewn onto the fabric and connected to an iPod-sized device. The uniform could show how many points a player has scored and track his or her personal fouls.

What does that have to do with fashion? A T-shirt from thinkgeek.com detects nearby wireless Internet signals, and the logo on the front of the shirt changes as Wi-Fi connection strength waxes and wanes, but requires you to tuck a AAA battery box under your belt (this could be a little dicey).

Younghui Kim worked in telecommunications for years and had "a really strong need to design something that could be felt or touched," she uses her background to design like a software engineer only using sewing machines and fabrics to bring fashion, technology and art together. Another fashion designer Anke Loh, from Chicago, collaborates with Philips to create textiles that emit and reflect light.

Technology is so much a part of our everyday lives we forget that these ideas would not have been possible five or ten years ago. The first portable computer I bought, around 1976, was a Compaq and it weighed 20-25 pounds. I carried it around to businesses who did not have a computer and setup databases to track inventory or did word processing for them.

My parents generation, World War II era, may be the only generation to see and experience such an excellerated pace of change which I find both exciting and sad at the same time.