One of the most transformative technologies of the past few decades is the evolution of modular platforms. We started with big bricks, moved on to flip phones, and are now in an era of pocketable computers. They’re multimedia Legos, capable of running apps, acting as the brains for hardware add-ons, and interacting wirelessly with other objects.
Borre Akkersdijk is trying to replicate that same evolution with clothing. Over the past few years, he’s created several proof-of-concept pieces that reimagine clothing as input devices, Wi-Fi routers, and air purifiers. Depending on where his pieces are showcased, he switches up their technological functions to solve location-based problems.
Akkersdijk, who describes himself as a textile designer, studied at Eindhoven Design Academy in the Netherlands and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. After school, he began experimenting with different kinds of knitting techniques, and a few years ago he was asked to help solve a common problem with the first wave of truly wearable technology.
“The Technical University of Eindhoven were doing a huge project called CRISP on smart textiles, and they bumped into the same problem every time,” Akkersdijk explains. “They were just sticking the technology onto the textile. It was just sort of a sandwich. And they were looking for new ways and base layers to put their sensor technology into.”
Using circular knitting machines that were originally built for making mattresses, Akkersdijk already made his creations pretty thick. That was one of the main draws to his technique: The thickness made it perfect for embedding and protecting fairly large sensors, as well as running wires within the clothing.
The university simply wanted to use some of Akkersdijk’s thick-cut fabric to embed sensors and run wires through without much external evidence. “They could cut them open and put in the bulky sensor technology---you wouldn’t feel it anymore, because it’s more just like a material,” he explains. But although Akkersdijk was interested, he didn’t think that would totally solve the problem.
“I said I like the idea, but if we’re going to go this way, I want to develop it,” Akkersdijk says. “I want to look into conducting yarns, into the sensor technology, and how you want to embed it. So what we started to do is, within the production process, is knit the conducting yarns in.”
The first project that would inspire Akkersdijk’s model for the future of wearables wasn’t even a wearable at all. In 2013, Akkersdijk worked with the Technical University of Eindhoven on a pillow that helps people with severe dementia communicate. He did this by designing a thick padded shell with internal motors, so that patients could share their gestures with a person holding the other side of the pillow.
“They don’t speak anymore,” Akkersdijk says. “So what they do is they sit, and they want to touch and they want to move, and they go back to their childhood senses … We thought we’d make a pillow that they can feel, that they can put on each other’s lap, and it vibrates on one side when you touch it and exactly the same on the other side. It’s sort of a new kind of communication. You could feel what the other person was doing and sort of touch each other’s hands.”
In 2014, the pillow prompted the interest of SXSW organizers, who wanted Akkersdijk to bring it to the show for a demo. Government programs in the Netherlands made it happen: Jan Kennis, cultural attache of the Netherlands to the U.S., has a unique job---he’s essentially a talent scout for Dutch creative professionals who works to find them audiences in the U.S.
“Our network is to know what’s going on, who is who, and who might be interested to program Dutch art,” says Kennis, who is living in Brooklyn on a four-year contract. “It can be a museum, it can be pop music, anything. So my task is to find American institutes, get them interested in Dutch art, and maybe have them pay for it as well. It’s very much about connecting to our culture.”
Kennis found out about Akkersdijk and his project through a former coworker and thought SXSW would be a good “strategic fair” to showcase his work. But Akkersdijk wanted to make a bigger splash than just showing off his pillow.
“I thought ‘come on, man,’” Akkersdijk says. “Twitter was launched here, Foursquare was launched there, and I’m going to go there like ‘hello I have a pillow’? A pillow. And I have to explain every time “yeah, it’s for people with dementia,” and the people there don’t have dementia. So I thought what am I going to do? So I said guys, I’m a designer and I do huge shows. I’m going to make a suit with the conducting yarns and I called some people to ask what SXSW was about.”
Friends who'd been to SXSW told him that finding a reliable Wi-Fi hotspot was a common problem at the festival. Because his colleagues wouldn’t be attending the show, they also wanted to be able to follow him on a map. And because SXSW is primarily a music festival, he thought there needed to be a musical component to the project. Luckily, some friends working for 22 Tracks, had an idea (as well as the potential for a promotional hook).
Thus, the BB.Suit was born. The BB.Suit is a 3D-knitted onesie with a battery pack, a Wi-Fi access point, a GPS tracker hooked up to a Google Maps interface, and a crowdsourced playlist that people could access and add to once they connected to it.
As to the design, Akkersdijk says he had good reason for creating it as a onesie. “There’s a larger space for extra technology,” he says. “But if you make just a simple, normal sweater, people are going to see it as a normal sweater. The moment you create a sort of suit that has a space age look, people are going to ask questions. The moment they ask questions, you can tell your story. So it was really an interaction we wanted to grab.”
It worked. The suit grabbed the attention of organizers for Beijing Design Week, but Akkersdijk still didn’t think the SXSW version of the suit was a good fit. Once again, he looked at the location of the show and tried to come up with a contextual conundrum for it to tackle.
“In Beijing, there was a really obvious thing that people had to deal with: smog and pollution,” Akkersdijk says. “We went to one of the circular knitting companies (in Shanghai) that developed everything for Nike and was working with Apple years back for wearable tech that didn’t totally go through. They said come to our lab, and we will help to develop it and all the different kinds of air filters.”
Akkersdijk found a research group from Germany that was making cold-plasma ionization units for car air-conditioning systems---somewhat bulky ones, but he figured the suit was going to be a bit bulky anyway. The benefit to that chunky unit was that it could clean up to 30 square meters---around 100 square feet---of polluted air around the user. He also decided the suit needed an air filter, one that “looked into the airspace” and gave a reading of how much smog was around you.
The system worked, and the design was slicker and more refined than his previous projects, but mass-marketing this air-freshening suit isn’t the goal nor the point.
“It’s just a proof of concept,” Akkersdijk says. “The intention was the same as SXSW, to make something that was just a path. Hey, it’s again the location, the aesthetics, the technology, that comes together---it’s not about one of those things, it’s about the concept of making a platform on and around the body. It can do something different in every location.”
Akkersdijk also sees these projects as the very first step to the ultimate goal for wearables: To enable communication in an organic, smartphone-free way. In order to make clothing a true platform in the way smartphones and computers have become, he is talking to research centers and large Dutch companies such as Philips and NXP about creating threads that host their own sensors, eliminating bulk and making smart clothing that’s as simple as using “smart” thread---something Google is notably working on as well.
Until then, he says that most current-generation wearables aren’t really wearables ("They’re more like 'carryables'… you still have to input things yourself”), though there are early signs of a new era of computing and communication in the Apple Watch.
“Communication has always been the drive for technology,” he says. “The Apple Watch is the first one that realizes we don’t need to type everything in. Siri is working, but now they are talking about if you have to go left, it’s one vibration, and if you have to go right, it’s two. That means you’re starting to think about communication on the whole body. And I think body language, and the heartbeat sharing, I think new ways of communication is what I want to get to. I want to say hi to my girlfriend just by rubbing my sleeve. Or you walk into a space where you have never been, and you need to go to the toilet… imagine that your body already reads that and is able to direct you to the nearest toilet. Little things like that.”
Before the smaller-scale technology is available that will enable those next-generation features, Akkersdijk is already conducting experiments that use sensor-laden clothing to transmit thoughts and feelings. He recently did a presentation in which he wore a special sweater loaded with heart rate, location, and other sensors that helped gauge his own energy levels. Some of the audience members were also hooked up to sensors themselves.
“Some were wearing hand sensors,” Akkersdijk says. “So suddenly, we saw livestreamed, on a huge screen next to me, [whether] people liked my presentation or not. If they were engaged or not. We had a whole series of balloons next to us, and each was linked to a person. If the person was not engaged, the balloon went down to a needle and popped. Luckily, none of them popped, but the whole idea was that we wanted to show what was going to happen if you don’t have to tell any device how you’re feeling.”
Being able to display personal "feelings" could lead to a whole new level of privacy invasion, but according to Akkersdijk, the results of his experiment were telling. He polled the audience members that declined to wear hand sensors, and most of them regretted not wearing them. They initially wanted to safeguard how they really felt, but then wanted to see their own readings alongside everyone else’s.
“You need privacy to be a human being. The whole thing was, you need to be able to say yes or no to it. People want their privacy but they are also curious," Akkersdijk says. “We need to discover. But it needs to be a decision, just like people turn location off when they don’t want to be found.”
