Fashionable Technology is a just released book on The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a compact survey of the theory involved and an explanation of the role technology plays in a fabric or article of clothing. (found via architectradure)

Therein lies the future – as a follow-on to my post Metamatter: Self-Reshapable Materials check out Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science. CTIHP is a report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Commerce (DOC), so its worth paying attention to. There’s also the follow-on Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations: Converging Technologies In Society.

Arthur Shaprio, vision scientist at Bucknell University, has setup a new blog featuring visual illusions with explanations of why they occur. I particularly like his Lucy in the Sky illusion.

Beautiful – The Singing, Ringing Tree.

Florian Kräutli has designed and created malleable magnetic curtains that retain their shape. Clunky elegance.

Embodied Cognition “is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes.” Learn more about this increasingly important area from this website. (via MindHacks)

Gimme gimme one of the Emotiv Brain-Computer Interface headsets. No contact gel required. Of course you could always build your own based on designs from the OpenEEG project.

Neat video of a time fountain optical illusion. Looks like water is running backward defying gravity and hanging in mid-air.

Dear Santa can I have a Dattoo (by frog design) and a Timeflex (from solovyovdesign). More at Top 10 technology wonders that don’t exist yet

A clever kinda crowdsourcing business idea: Low Cost Usability Testing

Scientists have discovered a second light-sensing system in the human eye that tells your body whether its day or night.

Got sometime to throw your ears in the direction of Philippe Starck’s TED talk about design?

Shape-memory alloys (SMA) are woven into the fabric. The SMAs change shape when power is applied and remember the shape after the power is disconnected.

Above are two images from Hussein Chalayan’s Spring 2007 fashion show. The image on the left shows a close up of a dress before it automatically altered its shape into what you can see on the right. There’s a video of the fashion show here – jump two minutes in for wonderful examples of clothes altering their shape while worn.

I wonder what will the first temporal fashion be? Will there be fashionistas wandering around wearing clothes that all change in the same way at the same time across the face of the globe? Or will hip be that which repeatedly and smoothly deforms with three twists left, one twist right and shows a brief hint of orange?