Modular Clothing
This interview with fashion Borre Akkersdijk discusses transitioning the current crop of wearables from "carryables", as Akkersdijk describes them, to truly wearable technology. The New York-based designer argues that the next big development in the field will be the ability to display the wearer's emotions: "&nbsp;I think body language, and the heartbeat sharing, I think new ways of communication is what I want to get to."
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.