Fashionable Technology - Parsons The New School For Design & Estonian Academy of Arts

Intro
Fashionable Technology looks at end users as fashionable beings, attentive to style, aesthetics, branding, and the expressive potential of wearable technologies. It refers to all design objects that are associated with aesthetics, wearability, or some degree of mobility. Thus, it includes experiments with enhanced materials, technologies, or electronic textiles, as well as testing the effects of the interaction with the objects. It deals with the aspect of craft and technology in a novel manner focusing on aspects of a ‘new generation of wearables’.
The projects presented are executed during the collaboration studio called “Fashionable Technology” at Parsons The New School For Design in New York during the Spring 2007 semester led by Sabine Seymour and Alison Lewis and the workshop course also entitled "Fashionable Technology" at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn during the Fall 2006 semester led by Sabine Seymour. In a contextual analysis, developed in group projects, the aspects of communication, aesthetics and functionality with a specific focus on the idea of dynamic surfaces were revealed and further defined. This required a parallel understanding of embedded system design, networked environments, and interdisciplinary design issues that validated the feasibility of such (wearable) dynamic surfaces. 
The diverse background of students in the studio coming primarily from the department Communication, Design, Technology at Parsons offered the ability to play with physical computing and design at the same time. The students from the textile department in Tallinn brought a fantastic insight of textile design using the Estonia as a backdrop for their projects.  
Institutions 
Communication Design + Technology at Parsons The New School For Design is a department and a collective design force of over 700 students and faculty engaged in work ranging from typographic exploration to geek graffiti, book design to game design, information visualization to animation. The programs in Communication Design (CD) and Design and Technology (DT) form a dual curricula that emphasizes experimentation, collaboration and social activism in the design of media experiences and new narratives for all kinds of people, in all kinds of places, around the world. 
The Department of Textile Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts focuses on two main areas of specialty know-how - weaving and fabric printing, with specialisation on creating clothing and furniture fabrics. Specialty subjects will introduce the student to designing unique textiles and industrial products, interior decoration principles, printing, dying and weaving techniques, knitting, felting, material studies, history of textile and applied arts, and ethnography.