Four college students from North Carolina State University have started to invent a nail polish that changes color when it contacts with date-rape drugs, including Rohypnol, Xanax, and GHB. They markets themselves to be “the first fashion company empowering women to prevent sexual assault”.

This product may not relate to any materials we talked about in class, but I found this one a very brilliant use of wearable technology, and also a very good combination of technology and social issue. When it comes to wearable/crafting technology products or accessaries, we often think of how to enclose the technical things using beautiful covering materials or sewing skills and make it neat, but this one just remains the original decoration. Although this doesn’t use any circuits and it more relates to the chemical reaction, it provides me an additional option of how to make my project neat.

The image below indicates how this product works in pubs and bars. As you can see, when woman want to detect their drinks, they have to put their fingers into the cup and stir. Some people think it is not the neat part when it comes to use. Also an article came right after their promotion, saying they don’t really understand anything about sexual assaults and most of the sexual assaults do not happen in the bars and relate to drinks.

These reviews may have their point of view, but this product opens the possibilities of using our body decorations as a practical way to protect ourselves. In the aspect of computational craft, this also inspires me to use certain parts of my body to be the conductive switch that triggers a circuit.

I stumbled upon this project from Hannah Perner-Wilson, called Joy Slippers.

They originally caught my eye on Instructables because I liked the aesthetic and there’s something intriguing about seeing old style coiled phone cables coming out of slippers.  I originally thought they were attached together, which seemed to have exciting implications, but they’re not as it turns out.  They have pressure sensors in them that send data back through the phone cables.

I also enjoyed looking at her x-IMU gloves.  Although, we’ve all seen the gloves loaded with sensors thing, i thought these ones looked a bit different.  I like the well controlled wires that are visible through the top.  It’s a good example of having an exposed guts look, while also looking very intentional.  For me, they also invoke connections to the central nervous system, which seems very appropriate.