[music playing] BECKY STERN: Having technology on you, around you, inside you 24/7 is going to be totally commonplace.

STEVEN DEAN: We're looking for new technologies and new ways of knowing ourselves.

SABINE SEYMOUR: I'm a strong believer that garments can do the same thing our actual skin does.

SANDY PENTLAND: We just have a little awareness of what's going on in the cyber side of you.

It's hard to know where they'll all go, but it's certainly going to be an interesting journey.

Wearable technology is just augmenting your awareness of things without getting in the way.

We explored the whole idea of wearable technology back in the early '90s.

And Thad Starner was one of my students.

He's the one that went on to produce Google Glass.

What we found is that why should you disrupt social interactions when you could just have ambient awareness?

Consider the history of the pocket watch.

Originally, watches were just these things that you had on the wall or the big clock tower.

And then, people began making them small and putting them in their pocket.

That idea spread and that's how the wristwatch was born.

It was nice to just have this awareness.

And that's the idea behind things like Google Glass.

It's not something that disrupts the social interaction, but these things can add a little to it, right?

They can annotate it.

They can augment it.

Really, it's a very social technology.

SABINE SEYMOUR: Anything you wear on the body as a second skin-- today, wearable technology is embedded into something, whereas long-term, you really have to think about, how do you make the fabric itself smart?

For example, think about a garment you don't have to wash.

They can change their shape, their color, fabrics that have a metallic coating or yarns that are conductive.

We want to make the actual fiber smart so that through nanotechnology, we can create a textile that can sense.

To me, garments are the node of a digital system.

So imagine that everything we wear becomes part of a digital environment, a digital network.

STEVEN DEAN: I am very excited to see the design community coming to health care and building better devices, better sensors, things which people would want to wear.

Being able to track or sense or measure, we can start to look at actual numbers about the current state of our body.

I'm going to use a sleep example.

I had suspected that I was getting interrupted at nighttime.

And so I purchased a headband that you wear and it measures brain activity.

And come to find out, I was waking up four or five times a night and it was taking on average about 20 to 30 minutes for me to go back to sleep.

I concluded that I was losing about two hours of sleep a night and really made a discovery.

I lived in a very commercial neighborhood and the noise of removing trash at night was waking me up.

So I moved.

What we're particularly interested in is the intervention part.

How can we then take the data that these sensors and these devices are giving us and then act upon it?

BECKY STERN: We're really interested in moving the DIY wearables movement forward.

Being able to make something yourself is very empowering.

So I'll make a project and a project video and tutorial every single week using conductive fabric, conductive thread, and provide you with a sample project with source code to get viewers out there able to make these things themselves.

One of the projects we made is a light-up necktie with multicolored LEDs along the line of it and a little microphone at the top.

And when you talk or when there's music playing, it acts kind of like a little volume meter.

But there's also very practical things.

We made a sew-able GPS unit that you can put into a jacket and have your jacket either help you find your way to your destination, alert you when you're there.

Also made a backpack that has LED turn signals and brake lights for your motorcycle.

Recently, we did a tutorial about making a big old ribbon hair bow.

It's just two LEDs and a battery.

I like doing simple projects like that that can get especially little girls really interested in making their own electronics.

Without open source hardware, people wouldn't be able to freely take other people's resources and learn from them and then investigate and create their own new extensions or modifications.

If you're going to wear something that's encrusted in LEDs, wouldn't you'd love to be able to say, yeah, I made this, instead of, yeah, I bought it for however many thousands of dollars?

SABINE SEYMOUR: I'm a very, very strong believer that garments can do more.

We can do many things.

STEVEN DEAN: The more that we instrument our body, the more that we can know about this complex machine that we have, the better we will be.

BECKY STERN: Wearable tech from where I come from is very different.

Instead of just buy, buy, buy, I want the thing with the newest features, you're dreaming up those features yourself and you're thinking about how you can make them a reality.

SANDY PENTLAND: Really, the whole society is made up of humans and computers interacting with each other.

That's cyborg, I'm sorry.

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