Forget fabric and stitches, think about a 3D printed dress adorned with embedded proximity and respiration sensors, wireless bio-signals connected to an Intel Edison platform and microcontrollers. Dutch FashionTech designer Anouk Wipprecht brings the garment and the wearer together thanks to an electronic couture with a futurist twist. Thirty-two-year-old currently living in New York, since the early 2000s she has been working on wearables, combining fashion design with engineering, robotics, science and interaction-user experience.

We met Anouk during the Fashion Week of Milan, where tonight she is going to give a lecture at Meet The Media Guru, the Italian platform that invites innovators from all over the world to share their ideas and projects (you can follow the event online). We talked about smart fabrics and accessories that can listen to our body, therapeutic fashion and the future of dressmaking.

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Imagine a future where you can design your own vegetables. Say goodbye to growing boring baby sprouts on your windowsill and welcome a climate-controlled cultivation system to your kitchen top. Simply change the parameters of your crops with a touchscreen interface and you’ll be on your way. Sounds good, does it? This growing scenario does not exist yet, but food designer and NNN fellow Chloé Rutzerveld is looking for innovative methods to turn this fantasy into a reality. Introducing the Future Food Formula, a formula for success.

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You step outside your home without your phone and are seized by a sudden fear. Or you notice that your battery is low when out and about and decide to get home as quickly as possible. Do you recognize these anxieties? According to researchers from universities in Hong Kong and Seoul, they may be symptoms of something called “nomophobia”. That is, no-mobile-phobia: the fear of being separated from your smartphone.

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