 So hello everyone, thanks for coming to our talk. We're here at EMF, like all of you probably are, for the fashion, right? But seriously, fashion is the first story that you tell when you enter a room. So who here bought an EMF t-shirt or has one from a previous year or wants to get one? Awesome. So by wearing that shirt, you're telling others that you're a part of the EMF community, that you're interested in making, or probably are a maker, and that you support a place for yourself and others to show off all your cool shit, right? So Shannon and I are actually involved with, why is this not clicking? I don't have to, I'm supposed to be able to just hit enter. So Shannon and I are both a part of Make Fashion. Shannon is the co-founder of Make Fashion, co-founded about ten years ago. I came in about six years ago as a designer and haven't left since. Make Fashion is a Canada-based not-for-profit collective that brings together designers, engineers, and makers to create fashion technology garments for the runway. Make Fashion has produced over 80 shows around the world, including North America, Asia, and Europe, and has produced over 300 unique fashion tech designs. And now I'm going to let Shannon talk through a few examples of different pieces. So just to catch up on Make Fashion again, this is one of our runway shows that we had in Calgary. This was a team from Ontario that made this piece. The idea behind it was to create, you know, to kind of combine technology and magic, they're trying to create a piece that kind of evokes a which is familiar. So the neat thing about this is the drone would lift up the train of the dress, follow her down the runway, and then land on the, you can see there's a glyph that she's just about standing on there. It had a camera that would track her and then land on the glyph when it was finished. So it was a really cool piece, but all about kind of this idea of storytelling. This piece was, or these pieces I guess, we did a runway show in Chengdu, China, and some of the students from the show there, they actually introduced us to the idea of edge glow fiber optics. Now how many people have used eel wire or, yeah, I hate eel wire. I feel like if you've used it you probably do a little bit too. So we've kind of switched over after this show in China, we've kind of switched over to using this edge glow fiber optics, and you can put a laser or an LED on the end of it and cause it to glow, which what was neat about that is we then brought them in this piece to our runway show in Calgary, where they were able to interact and learn from and share their knowledge with designers in Calgary. So it's been a really awesome opportunity to pass these ideas around and share them. And it's a beautiful piece. This was made by Angel and Alex, they're two of our indigenous designers. This piece was for to recognize missing and murdered women and our indigenous women, which has been like a problem over the past, I don't know, 50 years or something. There's been an inordinate amount of indigenous women killed if you look at the statistics, and they're trying to raise awareness for it. The dance that they're doing, I'm not sure how you, if you can tell, but they have these, the behind her elbows there, those are lit up and changing colors. This fancy shawl dress is meant to represent turning from a cocoon into a butterfly. That's the kind of the path of a womanhood for indigenous people. This is Nadine, Nadine's really, really awesome person. This kind of speaks to why I've learned why fashion is important and specifically fashion tech. When we met Nadine, when I met Nadine the first time, what I saw was somebody that was missing her legs at her knees and missing one arm at her elbow. It was, it's very easy to see how somebody is more different than they are alike. When that happens, it kind of erects a bit of a barrier, and I'm not like, I felt like I didn't understand her experience. There's no way I could understand her experience. But you know what, when she put on glowing prosthetics, well then all of a sudden it becomes an invitation, right? All of a sudden you want to go up and talk to her and learn about her because now it's a story. And I feel like, I don't know, I have that problem all the time of walking into a room. And if I, you know, and want to get noticed or want to talk to people, all I have to do is plug this thing in and very quickly, very quickly people will approach me and come and talk to me. You know, I don't know if this needs to be just a social crutch, but it works that way for me. One of the really cool things about it is that Nadine has, she just became one of our models. So afterwards we stopped even bringing up that she was a prosthetic model and there she is modeling one of our wedding dresses. Great story about her. She can adjust her height. So she can come in and I'll add five foot five or be five foot eight, depending on what you need. So she's hand, she has superpowers. So you may be wondering, how did make fashion come to be? And well, it starts with a farm boy and I'm going to let Shannon here tell his story. Yeah, so I grew up in a farm 40 miles away from the nearest paved road. My dad was given the directions to a surveyor stake and then drove a cat to that surveyor stake, cleared the land. And then as kids, we would pick rocks and roots and I would milk the cow before going to school in the morning. I actually have ridden a horse to school and a snowmobile. Yeah, so how does that lead to fashion technology? I really don't know. I escaped the real life. I moved to the city. I got my degree in computing science. Worked for some tech companies for a while, ended up missing this ability to because on the farm, if something's broke, you fix it. If you don't have something, you make it. You know, I missed that. So I got involved in the maker community. We hosted a bunch of maker fairs. I've ran the maker space. I've opened a couple maker spaces and that has kind of that rabbit hole has become my life. We started doing make fashion as a way to teach people about wearable technology. We thought that was interesting and it really kind of grew into a life of its own. It, when we had, when we did our first runway show, one of the pieces went viral. We got invited to do the Consumer Electronics show in Vegas and then 80 shows later, right? We took off some time. Am I telling this or am I getting it? You're doing it. I'm going to, I'm going to be quiet. Yeah, it's Sydney's turn. Okay. Okay, so my story is a little bit different than Shannon's. I've always liked to express my femininity. When I was a kid, there was a time of my life where I would literally wear nothing but dresses, the freer the better. Even when it was minus 40, I would still just convince my parents that I could wear snow pants and go to school in my dress. This developed into a love of fashion. When I was a bit older, I decided I wanted to be a fashion designer. But of course, my parents were like, no, there's no money in that. I should go into oil and gas because that's where all the money seems to go in Alberta. So when I started university, I went into chemical engineering. I soon discovered a love for computer science, which wasn't something that I thought that I would be capable of. But as it turns out, I'm pretty damn good at it. And yeah, I searched my major and haven't looked back. During my undergrad, I also got to work as a junior software developer at a company. But I felt very uninspired by this work, kind of similar to Shannon. They was just kind of doing the same thing over and over again. But so when the opportunity came up to join a research lab, I decided to take it, despite the big pay cut that I took and I still have. But doing research made me a lot happier. So I went on to do my master's. And during that time, I attended my first make fashion show and was just blown away by what I saw on the runway. I was inspired by how people were expressing their femininity through technology, which gets a bad wrap typically of being kind of a masculine thing. So I was just really inspired. And I wanted to do this myself. And I got in there, did my first runway show in 2016. And they haven't gotten rid of me since. So that's how a CompSci Geek has come to give you all fashion advice. And why farming and make fashion? I've discovered that since we're really the only international fashion tech runway show, all of the founders of fashion technology runway show are farmers. I don't know what happened there. That's how it works. My n equals one sample set leads me to believe. All right, so if there's a moral to this story at all, it's that unique experience, whoops, sorry. I'm just not doing this well today. So if there's a moral at all to this story, it's that unique experiences lead to unique innovations. So no matter who you are or where you come from, you bring a unique experience to everything that you do. And that can lead to some amazing unexpected places if you let it. So lean into what makes you different, because in a world of over 7 billion people, that's your superpower. So our goal during this talk was to give an overview of what we've learned from our experience with Make Fashion over the years to help you not repeat our mistakes. And there's been numerous. Yeah, we've made all of the mistakes. So lesson number one. Okay, this wasn't us. Lesson number one is tech can be hostile to human bodies. So we haven't said anybody to fire, at least not that anybody can prove. But there have been some uncomfortable near misses. I've soldered on several live models. That's not a good experience for anybody. When a model seems to see smoke coming from her hip, they have questions, understandably. I once swapped a battery. This is like minutes before the runway show walked. I swapped a battery out. And I have a habit of squeezing the microcontroller when I do that, because if you wire it backwards, those things will get very, very hot very quickly. Burned my thumb almost instantly, ripped it out, turns out that some of the manufacturers wire their batteries backwards. So yeah, those are painful lessons and can lead to really real, real problems. So another issue that we had is that garments with lots of wires and tech in them can be very, very difficult to dress or wear. So this was a show I did in Xi'an. We were in a big rush, again, minutes before the runway. And one of the models comes out looking like a seal cotton net. Like she literally was walking like this. It was so she came up to me to ask her to solve her problem. I didn't have time to. I clearly had time to snap a photo of this. I showed my translator a picture of what it was supposed to look and sent them off. And miraculously, they made it on the runway. Anyway, yeah. So these are issues that we have. Another thing, clips and wires are like they dig into you. They'll catch on your clothing. They can give you rashes, all sorts of things. So in order to solve some of these problems that Shannon just mentioned, we spent a lot of time on trying to simplify things like power management by building our power injection system. And it utilizes safe over-the-counter power banks. So at least this way, if something explodes, it's not our fault. So to explain this, I'm going to compare these two garments here. One was designed in 2015 and the other earlier this year. So the garment here, the samurai one, that's the one that was made in 2015. And it has approximately 2,600 LEDs on it. The model is wearing a custom hand-soldered power distribution belt that can power a small home for short periods of time. And this was created by someone who wasn't an electrical engineer. So we're happy to report that nobody caught on fire, but you can see where there could have been a chance. So now the other garment, this one was done for a theater production. This one also has 2,600 LEDs on it. However, it's using three over-the-counter power banks. No soldering was required to make this. And because we built it with a simple modular power injection system, we were injecting power into six locations on the garment. So it went very quickly. So the next lesson is, where's my lesson 2? Here it is. Oh, yeah. The next lesson is that the human body can be hostile to tech. So in this case, we sweat, we stretch, we move, and then sometimes we wipe out going like 60 kilometers an hour skiing down a ski hill and blow out all the connections. This was a commercial we did for Travel Alberta. And you can see kind of what we're putting some of the tech through. And general LEDs aren't built for that. So in this project here, our skills are put to the test because we were asked to build a skin-type performance garment for an aerialist who was able to bend his body in very unnatural ways. And this presented a similar problem to the ski commercial, which we solved with stretchy wires, silicone-coated LEDs, and silicone-stranded wires. We also switched to a connector that, if stressed, will unplug gracefully instead of breaking your solder joints. And as you can see in this video, Gerardo was able to move in his normal, unnatural ways. And the tech still held. Lesson three, diffusion can be tricky. So as Arthur C. Clark said, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That's kind of our goal here. I would argue that the one on the right is a little bit more magical. And that's kind of what we're aiming for to make. Sorry, I'm always jumping in on your slide here. Go ahead. You tell us why. Why is this one? No choice to say that. OK, sorry, go back. To make this one look the way it was, we used dual-edge emitting wires and a thin diffusion layer. So the LEDs that I'm wearing right now are those dual-edge emitting LEDs. They don't exist anywhere else on the market that I know of. But we built them so getting better diffusion would be a little bit easier. OK, now my turn. So when our runway shows got shut down in 2020, we decided to try to build a system that resolved all these issues so that anyone could build advanced, magical fashion tech or art projects. So far, here are our kit components. Our overall goal for the kit was to create robust, dynamic, and reliable fashion tech garments to give that power to others. So in the top where it's labeled A, you can see that's the power injector that I discussed earlier. And then B is some extender cables. So if you want to get a little bit more room in between your LEDs, you can use the silicone extender cables. C is the stretchy cables that we used for the CIRC performance. So you can see Shannon's just saying that they swires that stretch very well. D is our microcontroller that we created. This is loaded with the Baconix OS. It uses Bluetooth and connects to your phone. Talk a little bit more about Baconix in a second. E is our dual-edge emitting LEDs. So those are the ones that create that nicer diffusion. They come in lengths of 10 or 30 LEDs. So those are the 30 and those are the 10. And then we have the same ones in your classic forward tracing LEDs in 10 and 30 as well. And we're still experimenting to see if these are good length segments for fashion tech garments. We're still experimenting with everything. Yeah, everything's an experiment. So in addition to the hardware, we've partnered with Baconix to build software that controls the electronics without coding. So this leads to our no-code, no-solder framework for fashion tech. Yeah, so Baconix was a company that I'm not even sure how we discovered each other. I think they saw some of our stuff. They came and talked to us. I saw their software was blown away with what they're doing. They just released their software a couple months ago. It's free to use. There is a paid version, but the free version is really amazing. But their whole goal, they were doing props for movies. And their whole goal was to create something that would allow people to, you know, props makers to be like superheroes. Do you want to show them the... So this is a shot of a friend of mine, Ben Eadie there. I'm sure many of you will recognize the guy on the left. That's Adam Savage from Mythbusters. And on the right is one of the... So Ben Eadie was the props master for the last Ghostbusters show. And he did the props using the Enlighten kit on the right for the proton pack on the right. I guess that's not the proton pack, but yeah. Okay, so Piconix is super easy. It's literally just drag and drop and add an animation and go. So in order to prove that, I'm going to make a light up top right now in front of you. And it's gonna take me about five minutes. So if anyone wants to time that, go ahead and I'll get started. So bear in mind this is something that would normally take at least days. So the whole idea of what we've done here is we've created something that you don't have to solder and again, no coating. It can be assembled really quickly. We did do a little bit of movie magic here. We put the... So we've built, obviously built the top specifically for it. That's kind of the next thing we're trying to build in prototype. We have stretchy Velcro, which was another amazing discovery. And we already put the Velcro on the backs of the LEDs. The LEDs come with adhesive on them, but we just threw Velcro on it. And so Sydney is, she's plugged in the... There's a battery pack. There's kind of a slot for the battery pack on her back. She put a battery pack in there. She plugged the controller into it and now she's just attaching the LEDs. One of the things that we found is that with the LEDs, PVC wires were too stiff. PVC wires, they're uncomfortable to wear. So we went and used silicone-stranded wire. Now you cannot get LED strips with silicone-stranded wire. So I was talking to the factory that was making them. They made me buy six kilometers of silicone-stranded wire to get one of these done. So for each LED, I use seven and a half centimeters of wire. So I'm probably down to five and a half kilometers in my factory somewhere. So yeah, so she's just building this back and putting this together. She's creating a kind of a serpentine pattern. You'll notice that she's using like a kind of simple chevron pattern for the front. We've experimented with putting lights in every which way. The nice thing about the chevron pattern is you can bend and move around really easily. It also, I think, looks fairly attractive. It going straight out to the side doesn't look as good and vertical doesn't look as good. So that's kind of how we've set it up. So she's almost done putting in all the LEDs here. Do you want to turn it on first? So she's got it all set up. And then she's going to turn it on and then begin programming it. So this comes like she, when we're testing this, we pre-programmed it so you can see that it's actually running a program right now. And she'll put the top on. And then you get to see what it looks like with diffusion. But we're gonna jump to another slide right now, in theory. Do you know how we present that slide on the screen, or not that, the screen? Oh, there we go, okay. So this is the Beconyx programming platform. So she's going to create a new project here. Go under to the components and grab some LED strips. There you go. Strips, you can probably just look at your, oh, you can't look at your screen, right? No, I can't. Okay, double click here, straight 10. Thank you. Right there, down. What's that? Oh, you can zoom in. No, it's just because I can't see. Yeah, she can't see it on her screen. So, anyway, that's fine. So double click on that a bunch of times, or just, yeah. So now she's angling it in the direction that it would be on the piece. Yeah, there's 10 of them. This is going to take slightly longer than five minutes because... Because I can't see? Yeah, let it go, you got to grab the end. Okay, so she's going to copy, paste, paste, paste, you're doing it on an angle again. I know, I always do it on an angle, I don't know why. Okay, all right, so she's created, so she has four strips per side. So she's now just arranging them so that they're like they are on her piece. You can see as she drags it here, because she specified 10 LEDs, she can make that any length and it'll auto, it won't change the number of LEDs on there. If she specified a length, then it would, like she could, if she changed the length, then it would add LEDs to it. So it's very easy to use kind of naturally. Now what she's doing is she's flipping them end for end. That will allow her to change the direction in the program to be the same as what she's wearing. The cool thing about this is now the software is spatially aware of where the LEDs are on her garment. You're connected to your skirt, by the way. So you can see on the upper right there, that she's, yeah, so click on that one. Hopefully that's not mine. Okay, we'll see. So now she's drug program on there and go ahead and load it. Okay, there you go. Yahtzee. So that was. It was a little longer, but if I wasn't so blind and had newer glasses, it would've been better. That was your five minute fashion tech thing. Now let's play around with this a little bit. Can you double click on the program on the timeline? The bottom left. If I can find my mouse, there we go. Yeah. Okay, double click on it. So go down here, see where it says direction. Change the direction to a Y. Okay, and then load the program again and then show everybody. So now you see it's going up and down the garment. So that was like three hours of programming that happened right there. If you wanna, actually, why don't you stand there and then I'll do this. I'll try and do this. Actually, this isn't gonna work for me either because I don't know how to use a Mac. All right, I'm gonna go change the colors here. So if I go here, let's, we want some green here and then I'll upload. There we go, we got green. Any suggestions? We're spitballing here. Let's go into the library and grab another program. Just gonna drag this one on. Oh, add trigger. No, I don't wanna do that. There we go. Yeah, I did it. If I want to, I can set my fade in and fade out points here. You can see on the screen here, it'll preview for you, which is pretty cool. You notice it's going along the x-axis there. I'm gonna load it again and I think you're gonna have to repower. So one of the issues that we have, unplug and plug in, one of the issues that we have with our tech or with the power banks that we buy from Walmart that don't blow up on us is if you're not running enough power to them, they turn off. So that's what happened there. So she's restarted it. I'm gonna select, gonna reconnect to it. All right, I'm not, it's fighting me here, Sydney. Okay, there it goes. And I'll reload the new program on. So sorry. My mask. Yeah, so it's going through the first one and then you'll see it switch to the next one. So if you wanna add sensors to this, the growth, it has two growth ports on it. You can throw on like, do you have the sensor on yours? No. I do on mine actually. I can, do you wanna connect to me? If you can. How are we doing for time? Two minutes. Let's see if we can add sound reactivity to this. So connect to me. I gotta stand near you because my intent is off. Yeah, because there I think. Yeah. Can you load my program? The men's t-shirt sound. Click on the top. Yeah. I will cheat then. Show them how this works and then I will load it. Okay. So I broke my antenna, so it's my fault here. So how this works is you just drag a sensor on just like you would your LEDs, except now you can double click on the sensor and you can tell it what tracks you want to trigger. And then you can go in and you can actually preview the sound. He's not connected though, so there's no preview right now, but you can set the certain wavelength to react the way you want it to. So I have just loaded the program that she's showing here. So you'll notice that we have a white sparkle at the top and then the low notes are gonna make blue, the medium notes are gonna make green and the high notes are gonna make red. So let me try this here. So if anyone has tried to integrate sensors into wearable technology, again that was hours if not days of programming. So anyway, that's us. We just like to say thank you for coming. If you're interested in our tech, please come check us out. Our email's there, website, or follow us on Instagram. And we'll be outside here for a bit. I'll be here till tomorrow morning. I'll be wearing this, so I'm easy to find. Sydney's got a head out, but yeah, we're more than happy to answer any questions.