OLED Dress

The dress in the video above was completely designed out of flexible OLED (organic light emitting diode) displays. The video itself brings up a lot of very important ideas in design. With our increases in technology, are we becoming frivolous, wasteful?

Personally, I love and hate this design. The impact upon walking onto the floor - quite impressive. The idea of designing and powering such a device, a dress, is truly an impressive feat in itself.

But just because we can use flexible screens as cloth, should we?! This question of course has no succinct answer. From a tech geeks point of view, of course! All advances in technology are welcome. And true, we probably won't be seeing many OLED dresses in the near future, but who is to say we won't start seeing OLED technologies incorporated in shirt front. Ha! Imagine having the ability to change that clever comment on your favorite T whenever you like!

Yet even with such "cool" opportunities, I ask about the necessity. Even with advances in technology, most lasting technology has to meet some kind of need (or at least introduce to a need we weren't aware of needing - like social applications such as Facebook and Twitter.) With limited resources, designing such a dress must have cost thousands upon thousands of dollars. Is such money well spent?

This question is highly debatable, but the bottom line is this.

All artistic endeavor imparts some sort of thought on the audience. This dress, as awesome or wasteful as it is, imparts quite a few questions.