Day: 23 December 2009

Pollution Dress is Stylin’

A fashion designer has made a dress with a CO2 detector in a dress then lights up using LEDs depending on the concentration of CO2 in the area.

The Climate Dress is made of conductive embroidery, over hundred of tiny LED lights inserted into the embroidey, a CO2 sensor and an Arduino Lilypad microprocessor. The LEDs visualize the level of CO2 in the nearby surroundings and are powered trough the embroidery!
For The Climate Dress we used soft conductive thread that has a similar consistence to the kind of thread used for traditional and industrial embroidery production. This way it is possible to make embroidery that become more than an esthetical element in clothing and interior textiles.

The embroidery becomes functional conveying electricity and computer information and thereby give “power to the dress”. The dress senses the CO2 concentration in the air, then accordingly creates diverse light patterns varying from slow, regular light pulsations to short and hectic. The technology, which integrates ”soft circuits” into the production of embroidery, is an innovative process. It is the result of a fruitful collaboration between Copenhagen based design studio diffus, Swiss embroidery company Forster-Rohner, the Danish research-based limited company Alexandra Institute and finally the Danish School of Design.

See the dress here.

How CoP-15 Changed the World

Depressed about the Copenhagen Accord? While the action on climate change may have been less than you were hoping for, Worldchanging.com has an article explaining how the conference signaled a different kind of sea change. According to Alan Akisson, this was the first major event where developing nations had voices as loud as the developed, in a truly democratic process.

The Earthquake in Copenhagen truly marked the end of one historical era, and the beginning of a new one. It is an era of more democratic global governance (at least in the sense of how power, actual and perceived, is dispersed among nations). An era of continuous struggle to understand what is happening to our planet, and continuous effort to share that understanding. An era of nations being forced to collaborate, more and more closely, and over several decades, on planetary management. In the hindsight of future history (especially environmental history), CoP-15 will likely loom large indeed as an inflection point, a time when everything changed — or rather, was finally seen by all as changed.

Read the whole article