The Musical T-shirt Workshop at the V&A museum

By Anna Blumenkranz and Emilie Giles

When we imagine wearable technology we might think about activity trackers such as the Fitbit or clothing which can be swiped to give us information such as the Google and Levi Commuter Trucker Jacket. However, there is also a playful and DIY-craft-based approach to wearable technology. We ran a two day workshop at the V&A exploring how we could embrace these experimental hand-made wearables, and empower each participant to tweak electronics to create their very own wearable piano or synth.

Introduction to Wearables: Musical T-Shirts. Photo: Anna Blumenkranz and Emilie Giles

The project was inspired by the Fabric Piano project by Leah Buechley and Kanjun Qiu in their book Sew Electric, which uses the Lilypad Arduino Simple Snap and conductive threads and fabric to make a soft instrument based on capacitive sensing. We wanted to build on this exciting tutorial and come out with our own version of it. Anna had already ran her own version of the workshop before in Munich and we thought the V&A audience would love it too!

Find out how it went on the V&A blog here.