Inside the Design of Google's First Smart Jacket
Google's futuristic Project Jacquard is making its commercial debut - as a jean jacket. Last year, Google announced Project Jacquard: an intriguing plan to turn all of your clothes into touchscreen controllers, partnering with Levi's to incorporate the technology into its denim products.
23 May 2016
| Lisa Grant
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via
Fast Company - CoDesign
Last year, Google announced Project Jacquard: an intriguing plan to turn all of your clothes into touchscreen controllers, partnering with Levi's to incorporate the technology into its denim products.
Now, a year later, and Levi's and Google have announced the first retail garment with Project Jacquard inside: the Levi's Commuter x Jacquard, a trucker jacket with a multi-touch sleeve that lets you control your Android smartphone—without ever pulling it out of your pocket.
During an ATAP presentation at Google I/O, interaction designer Ivan Poupyrev and Levi's VP of Innovation, Paul Dillinger, took the stage to show off what the Commuter x Jacquard could do. The jacket has a patch on the sleeve that serves as the interface between you and your phone.
It's aimed primarily at bike commuters; a cyclist riding down the street could tap the sleeve of their jacket to get an ETA on how long it will take for them to reach work, swipe the cuff to cycle songs on Spotify, double tap to accept an incoming call, or triple tap to dismiss it.
The decision to make a jacket, says Dillinger, ultimately came from a desire to make a garment which was useful all the time. "How many jeans do you have in your closet, compared to how many jackets?" he asks. "In our research, we discovered that 70% of our customers have at least one jacket they wear more than three days a week." He points out that there aren't many garments that we find personally or socially acceptable to wear more than half of our waking lives without changing.
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