This morning, my patience was rewarded when I received a foreign-looking envelop with a very smooth and soft texture. The sender was without a doubt: Spoonflower, as was indicated with their logo in the left top corner. And I must say – unpacking the sample was quite some experience. As the pictures show, at Spoonflower a lot of attention is dedicated to the presentation of the product.

The sample is protected with a piece of very thin paper – you know that kind of paper very expensive clothes are wrapped in – and a sticker with the Spoonflower logo on top!After gently opening the package, you first stumble upon a little piece of fabric with again the Spoonflower logo printed on. And I must say, it looks great and if I’m honest it looks better on fabric than on my computer screen (the details of the logo are more visible on the fabric than on the website).
Another pleasant touch is the handwritten ‘thank you‘ of Danielle on the shipping receipt! It makes me feel just a bit special and not customer number 0000036450.
So Danielle of Spoonflower; you’re very welcome!

But the most important thing is of course the order: the business cards! How does it look? Are the expectations fulfilled? Are the colours the same as the ones on my computer screen? …. Although I liked the concept of Spoonflower from minute one, I have to admit that I had some reservations! But today, they all have vanished like snow on a sunny day.

The sample of our business cards looks just great. The colours are the same as on the original file. For one moment, I panicked since there seems to be a difference between the colour an font of my name and Niels’ name. But when looking at the original TIF-file; it also shows those minor differences. It’s a very strange thing: when I print the file on a piece paper, you don’t see it, but when printed on fabric, they become visible!

So my conclusion: I’m very excited about the Spoonflower service: the sample exceeded my expectations and I’m positive that those samples go in production!

My colleague Rudi has blogged at Hunting a Snark on the LilyPad Arduino.

The Arduino modules are popular because they are very hands-on and it takes little effort to learn to use them. I see a lot of my non-tecchie students using them to use sensors etc.

The LilyPad Arduino is a variant of the Arduino modules, it consists of “sewable electronic components that let you build your own soft, interactive fashion”. It was created by Leah Buechley at MIT.

As one can connect sensors, LEDs, accelerometers to the LilyPad Arduino board and sew it into your bag, hoodie, T-shirt,… the possibilities for building interactive textiles seem unlimited.

Check out Leah Buechley photos on Flickr.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Today, I stumbled upon a post from PSFK that grabbed my attention. At Squidder, they apparently love augmented reality and besides an nice experiment with a car, they made an augmented reality Twitter feed shirt.

On the front of the shirt, a pattern – containing a Twitter username – is printed. When the pattern is detected by computer or phone, the Twitter feed from the corresponding Twitter user (embedded in the pattern) is displayed!

PaperTweet3d: Augmented Reality T-shirts from squidder on Vimeo.

Some months ago one of my colleagues pointed me to a talk by the American psychologist Barry Schwartz. In his presentation “The Paradox of Choice” he focusses on one of the central elements of our Western Society, the freedom of choice. Common belief starts from the idea that we need a lot of choice to feel free. Schwartz argues that too much freedom will eventually make us “more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied”.

I’d like to link the concept of “too much choice” to an element my colleague Katrien stumbled upon. She found research which indicated that in the process of mass customization the concept of  mass confusion is likely to pop up. Mass confusion can be seen as the burden of all the effort, complexity and risk a customization process provokes.

In an article titled “Overcoming Mass Confusion: Collaborative Customer Co-Design in Online Communities “ a way to overcome mass confusion is co-designing: collaboratively working on a design would make it easier to overcome the stress of mass confusion.

In customisation process finding the right balance between (collective) guidance & individual freedom should thus be one of the key questions.