– 5.22.2013
– 3401 Market Street
Since opening in late 2012, Drexel’s Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (ExCITe) Center and its main players have worked to demonstrate how the conversion of many technologies—whether humanoid robots, video games, and in the case of the center’s Shima Seiki Haute Technology Laboratory, digital knitting machines—can encourage innovation across multiple fields. In its own corner of the center, the Shima Seiki lab and its cutting-edge technology are enabling Drexel researchers to explore the capacity of knit structures and novel materials to push the development of technology that can be worn on your sleeve.
- Stop by the Shima Seiki lab and there’s a good chance you’ll run into Genevieve Dion, the lab’s director and founder, and an assistant professor in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. Dion is an award-winning designer—and celebrities such as Tina Turner and Elvis Costello have an eye for her work. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on identifying production methods that advance the field of wearable technology, or “smart garments,” which can potentially be used in numerous applications, varying from medical to military uses.
- Yes, that’s a pregnant mannequin, and no, it’s not sporting the latest style in maternity wear. The garment Dion is adjusting is a Belly Band, a monitoring machine for high-risk pregnant women made possible through the collaboration of the lab and the College of Engineering and School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems. The Belly Band is able to transmit radio signals via the conductive yarn from a pregnant woman to the patient’s physician, indicating any changes in the uterus.
- Kara Lindstrom, enabler for the ExCITe Center, gets her hands dirty in all aspects of the center—including the Shima Seiki lab. As a coordinator across all of the center’s platforms, Lindstrom helps to foster the center’s goal: to provide both an open work area for inter-college collaboration and a place to showcase multidisciplinary activities and projects.
- This seamless knit dress—often one of the space’s most admired pieces—was created using one of the Shima Seiki
knitting machines and was donated to the laboratory by Dr. Masahiro Shima, CEO and president of Shima Seiki in Wakayama, Japan. As part of the growing partnership between the world leader in 3D knitting systems and Drexel, Shima Seiki donated 16 SDS-ONE APEX3 workstations, three state-of-the-art knitting machines and R&D support—a total aggregate value of more than $1 million. - Perhaps the most eye-popping fixtures of the lab, the four state-of-the-art digital knitting machines—including this one, manned by Chelsea Knittel, an undergraduate in Pennoni Honors College studying sustainable materials and design—can produce an individual garment in approximately 30 minutes. The machines are capable of producing everything from seamless dresses to “knitbots,” knitted robots that are able to move thanks to their shape and use of a nickel titanium wire.