Smart clothes and accessories

Released on: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 8:00 AM

    

Smart Clothes Part of Back To School Cool  

Smart clothes and accessories are what’s tech-cool for back-to-school. It’s definitely the post Jetsons’ era featuring clothing capable of real communication.  The newest items aren’t from G-A-P; they’re from M-I-T and Nokia.

Being up to date on the “do’s’ and “don’ts” of viral fashion may seem like a lot of additional pressure to place on a parent’s shoulders. However, parents are no longer alone, there are now a plethora of retailers and resources committed to producing and distributing those back-to-school essentials that you never even thought to put on your shopping list.  

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one such surprising fashion resource. MIT is a forward thinking development team, working towards practical solutions that will better enable students of all ages to meet the demands placed upon them in the 21st century. It is no longer merely a matter of pens, pencils, crayons and calculators; children of this technological era must be allowed to express themselves in a range of different ways, if they are to fulfill their full potential. MIT and others in this field have brought about advancements in technology, such as; rucksacks and backpacks that can change their design at a whim, digital bracelets that adapt to different environments and versatile rubberized notebooks, all of which involve a high level of user-interaction and customization.

MIT has created school satchels with patterns that can be made to adapt to the wearer’s environment. These designs can then be shared wirelessly with other satchels in order to initiate the viral propagation of a new fashion in satchel design. This idea stems from military research into adaptive camouflage, however, unlike in the military, it is not important that all students’ school satchels look the same. For those students that wish to be unique (like everyone else), MIT has modified the bags so that the wearer’s can choose not to share their designs or they can ‘loan’ designs to others, which will degrade after a certain time period, leaving the original wearer with the only true, sustainable copy.

It’s not just MIT that is working hard to produce the next generation of must-have school gear. Nokia, in a radical departure from their traditional mobile phone handsets, produced an extremely hi-tech bracelet, which predictably acts as a mobile phone device but is also able to control a wide range of factors in the wearer’s environment. Moreover, the bright sparks at Gelfrog have produced a new kind of notebook, not a laptop computer, but just as hi-tech. These notebooks can acts as a mirror, micro-camera, projection screen and feature a level of customization comparable to the backpacks produced by MIT.

So, when preparing your children to go back to school, remember that it is the 21st century, in which a whole new set of demands are placed upon students. As such your children may require and/or desire a range of products that you never knew existed but are essential in order for your children to be ‘cool’ at school.

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