Throughout 2020, the year that changed the lives of everyone around the world, a new opportunity arose for many companies to take advantage of this situation and therefore profit off of it. At the start of the pandemic, there was a unique shortage of new essential products like masks, antibacterial gels, and any other protective…

During the seventh meeting of the Transmission in Motion seminar, students and researchers from different backgrounds had the chance to discover and learn more about the intersection of theory and practice in the context of smart clothing research. Fashion designer Pauline van Dongen and Media and Culture scholar Lianne Touissant presented their works. As they…

In a paper titled “In Touch With The Now: Stimulating Mindfulness Through a Smart Denim Jacket” (2019) Pauline van Dongen and Lianne Toussaint delineate the effects that van Dongen’s smart denim jacket called ‘Issho’ produces on embodied experience. With ‘Issho’, they distance themselves from other smart garments that commonly perform as an intermediary between screen…

“Moving together means working together.” Menke Steenbergen, founder of IPOS Technology. On April 28th, 2021, the Transmission in Motion Seminar hosted a discussion on ‘smart technology’ in fashion with Pauline van Dongen (fashion designer) and scholar Lianne Toussaint (Media and Culture) (Utrecht, 2021). As part of their Ph.D. projects, van Dongen and Toussaint reflect on…

As a pairing of researchers, Lianne Toussaint and designer Pauline van Dongen’s collaborative approach to the theory and practice of smart clothing demonstrates how a critical exchange of material knowledge and theoretical inquiry was crucial in their proposal, creation, and discovery of emergent relations between ourselves and the garments we wear. This dynamic formulation of…

On April 28th, 2021, at the seventh Transmission in Motion seminar, fashion designer Pauline van Dongen and Media and Culture scholar Lianne Toussaint discussed their PhD projects relating to wearable technology. As the title of the session, ‘When Designer Meets Academic – Theory and Practice of Smart Clothing’, suggests, the seminar focussed on the intricate…

During the most recent Transmission in Motion (TiM)-session, Pauline van Dongen and Lianne Toussaint presented their academic and non-academic endeavors in – to put it very succinctly – the field of clothing design. During this session, somewhat of a moral discussion came up, as one of the attendees asked how he could best go about designing things…

In the latest TiM seminar, we were joined by designer Pauline van Dongen and academic Lianne Toussaint. When they met during their PhD projects, one thing stood out for them both: they approach creative processes differently, based on their backgrounds. Van Dongen told us about the transition from design practice to academic practice, which involved…

Pauline van Dongen’s clothing designs take postphenomenology as inspiration, aiming to highlight how materials and technology mediate our experiences in the world. Van Dongen describes her work as merging “use” with “being.” We often use clothes, or simply wear them without second thoughts, but this designer aims to reveal the capability of clothing to mediate…

The synergy between academia and industry has always been productive, innovative, yet frictional.  Pauline Van Dongen, a fashion designer, and Lianne Toussaint, a scholar of media and culture, have been collaboratively working together and mutually inspiring each other with their own specialty. As both “design thinking” and “theory-inspired practices” have been addressed several times in…