Leah Buechley: How to “sketch” with electronics (TED talk)

 Leah Buechley
Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
AT&T Career Development Professor
Director, High-Low Tech Group
MIT Media Lab

High-Low Tech Group
Publications
Previous Research
MIT Media Lab
     

Leah Buechley is an Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directs the High-Low Tech research group. The High-Low Tech group explores the integration of high and low technology from cultural, material, and practical perspectives, with the goal of engaging diverse groups of people in developing their own technologies. She is a well-known expert in the field of electronic textiles
(e-textiles), and her work in this area includes developing the LilyPad Arduino toolkit. Her research was the recipient of a 2011 NSF CAREER award and has been featured in numerous articles in publications including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Popular Science, and the Taipei Times. She received PhD and MS degrees in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BA in physics from Skidmore College.

Before her two projects she thought of designing electronics as "cumbersome" and expensive.

She has created a number of different things using conductive paint, pens and different materials. She calls some of them paper computing, this is a really innovative way to extend the use of computers and technology in general, even incorporating them into design and other projects such as fashion. In the ted video she creates switches, a piano and a couple of different things all using a conductive pen, magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper.

I think that using this method of combining art and electronics could create some fantastic interactive design pieces that could benefit the design industry immensely.