CUTE CIRCUIT:

Our first stop in London landed us in the Cute Circuit studio, where all the company magic happens. Cute Circuit is a company that designs wearable technology. You must understand fashion and interaction design in order to understand Cute Circuit. The company was developed by the two people we were speaking with, Ryan and Francesca. They were a power couple with a great attitude and they were really excited to share their projects with us. The first project that the Cute Circuit team prototyped was a hug shirt, a shirt filled with censors where you could feel another shirt owner’s hug when they sent it to you. This shirt was prototyped in 2002 and was presented 4 years later in 2006 where Time Magazine featured the company, starting their fame. The shirt never got to launch on the market due to archaic technology in other aspects. Cute Circuit has continued to work on this project as other technologies are developing, in fact it is almost ready to release! They then began to experiment with dresses, they made the M-dress which was essentially a phone dress. You would raise your wrist to answer a call and the dress acted as a speaker phone. After this was developed, the team was asked to develop a piece for a prestigious museum in a ‘fashion of the future’ exhibit.  They created a dress that was named ‘the galaxy dress’, which had a total of 24,000 led lights and took over 6 months to create.  This galaxy dress sparked the interest of singer Katy Perry, who demanded a replica in only 3 days.  Cute Circuit was thrilled to outfit someone such as Katy, so they worked hard to create something similar by working around the clock.  It seemed that after Katy wore the dress, demand for more products flew in!  A more affordable consumer dress was created for anyone to buy as they made more outfits for Katy Perry performances, such as American Idol and the Itunes Music Festival.  If you watch a performance video, you’ll notice that the led patterns are ever-changing.  The change is actually done through a remote control and it is done live with the performance using a software that Ryan developed.  Cute Circuit has since developed monumental pieces such as T-Shirt OS, the Twitter dress, and the Magnum vote dress.  I’ll post the link below to the company website where you can view all of their projects!

http://cutecircuit.com/