What I find fascinating about textiles,
is that the structure of textiles is the same as the structure of touch screens
which we use in everyday mobile devices and tablets.
That means, that if you just replace some of the threads in textiles with conductive threads,
you should be able to weave a textile which can recognize a variety of simple touch gestures.
Just like any normal touch panel you have in a mobile phone.
So if you can hide or weave interactivity and input devices into the materials,
that will be the first step to making computers and computing invisibly integrated
into objects, materials, and clothing.
So this is exciting to me.
The challenge of creating Jacquard yarn,
was to create yarn that is highly conductive, and at the same time scalable.
Which means it could be used in industrial weaving machines everywhere in the world.
For textile designers, or fashion designers, or furniture designers,
it is interesting because it is something you are very familiar with, it's just textile.
We made the yarn very thin and it feels so natural, so it looks like just normal yarn.
The only thing that is different, is that it is conductive.
We worked with textile designers from all over the world
and it's really interesting to see what kind of possibilities that we can have.
It could be visible—very obviously, like it is here.
It also can be totally invisible.
So we are creating possibilities by combining different ways of weaving techniques.
And that is totally up to the designers to choose and it is up to their creativity.
We are trying to shrink down all of the components down to the size of a button.
And ultimately this will be something that is so small we can embed into the manufacturing process.
So the users won't even see it or feel it inside the garment.
The idea that Jacquard is an interface that is blended into the clothing that we wear—
that has an implication in the way that you would use services, products, applications,
and anything that we do through our devices.
It is somehow getting the technology out of the way
and making interactions more natural and more seamless.
In terms of what the technology can do, it's really up to the user and to the designers
and we expect that users can reconfigure it as much as they want to.
Software development and fashion design
often don't exist in the same place.
So we're hoping to make it very simple for each of those parties
to collaborate and we're hoping to provide both software and hardware knowledge and components
to make those collaborations very easy.
We like to think that we have these iconic products that haven't changed much,
but the world is changing so I think Jacquard presents a great opportunity
for a brand, for design to open a door to the future.
In tailoring we use methods that have been used and not changed for 200 years
so when something new comes along, it's really exciting.
What's amazing about the project is that I don't have to have any knowledge about the electronics and how it works.
So let's see what we can create with it.
Jacquard is a blank canvas, for designers and for developers.
We are just at the beginning.
And we are really excited to see what people are going to do with it.