Inventables

When I was at the TED conference a few months ago I met Keith Schacht and Zach Kaplan the founders of Inventables, a amazing new company offering a really unique product.

Inventables produces a quarterly hands-on magazine designed to introduce, educate, and inspire users about new materials and technologies. Every issue contains 20 difference new interesting materials. Each material is tagged with a card explaining how to use it, what is interesting and gives a few ideas of how the material could be used to create a new innovative product.

When they showed this to me at TED my eyes lit up and I knew I had to get a subscription. The other day I finally received my first issue and it is very cool. Some of my favorite materials are the Double-Image Metal Engraving, Flexible Wide-Angle Fresnel Lens, 3D Knitted Fabric, and then Stretch Sensing Rubber. I can't wait to see what they come up with next issue.

Here is an example, the Stretch Sensing Rubber pictured above.

The card explains the material...

Attach the battery and stretch the rubber string watch the light bulb. This allows you to measure how stretched something is even if bent around a corner or woven into fabric. Also, this rubber can be made any shape (e.g. sheets).

The material is synthetic rubber with carbon particles mixed in to make it conduct electricity. As stretched, the conductivity decreases (but the bulb brightens because the circuit reverses).

then gives you a few ideas of how the material could be used...

Step: There is a classic toy that is a paddle with a rubber ball attached by a rubber band. Replace the rubber band with this sensor to add electronic scoring and sound effects.

Stretch: Wrap the sensor around your chest to monitor breathing and lung capacity.

Leep: A unique control for MP3 players, skip to the next song by stretching.