Cute Circuit with University of Ulster staff

"Its products and art installations have been featured worldwide. Its Hug Shirt was named one of the Best Inventions of the Year by TIME Magazine. CuteCircuit combines telecommunication and smart textile technologies with innovative design concepts to create new user experiences. CuteCircuit designs products that make you happy!" CuteCircuit are concerned with HCI (Human Connection Interaction), questioning what is the experience of using their products? How people interact with them? What happens to the product when people are finished with it?

Clothes are 1000 of years off, fashion has changes but our clothes have not. CuteCircuit have revolutionized fashion in today's world. They have merged it with technology to create experiences for the buyer. Some of their technology advancements include Blue-Jacking and Pod-Casting producing this missing link has been Experiential Clothing Design. Designing clothes that empower the user. For example the Kinetic Dress, an evening gown reactive to the wearer’s activities and mood. The Hug Shirt, a shirt that makes people send hugs over distance. Embedded in the shirt there are sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and the heartbeat rate of the sender and actuators that recreate the sensation of touch, warmth and emotion of the hug to the shirt of the distant loved one. My favourite the Accessory Nerve, a Bluetooth mono-sleeve accessory for mobile phones that changes pattern (creating pleats on the fabric) when a user receives phone calls. The wearer recognizes the sender from the pattern the pleats create when receiving an incoming call. If the user is in a meeting or busy can simply flatten the pleats back into the original position, automatically the caller will receive a text message saying “I’ll call you back later”. The Accessory Nerve allows users to exchange information and greetings in a subtle and intimate way. Brilliant!


Cute Circuit worked closely with two lectures at our University, Liam McCormish and Christine Blaney developing a wearable technology system and interactive environment to aid pre-school children in learning to read called 'Jump, Skip, Learn'. Children wearing a smart textile wristband were able to magically control many activities and objects inside this environment. When the children raised their arms it caused the sun to come out, but dropping their hands repeatedly caused the rain to fall, and clapping their hands brought resounding thunder and lightning! I love this idea in creating interactive play environments that animates a healthy physical space whilst developing language and literacy skills. Synthetic Phonics are incorporated which aids the children to sound-out words. I was interested to find out the range of collaboration for such a project. It extended to children, educationalists, technologists, designers and typographers. It made me consider my own project and who I would look to for collaboration in realizing it.