Ada Lovelace Day was established last year as an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. If you’re not already familiar with Lady Ada, it’s worth learning more… The daughter of Lord Byron, she worked with Charles Babbage on his analytical engine and wrote the world’s first computer program.

In honor of Lady Ada, I’d like to highlight a handful of the women who inspire me in the world of wearable electronics and soft circuitry.

Leah Buechley

Director of the High-Low Tech research group at the MIT Media Lab, Leah developed the Lilypad Arduino – the microcontroller boards I’ve been using in my own wearable electronics experimentation. It’s a dream of mine to someday be involved with her lab – they come up with incredible, innovative, and beautiful things there!

LED Bracelet - Leah Buechley, 2005

Hannah Perner-Wilson

One of the graduate research assistants in Leah Buechley’s lab, Hannah has developed some incredible resources for others interested in wearable electronics, including the reference site HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT (with Mika Satomi) and a bunch of Instructables.

Knit & Crocheted Sensors - Hannah Perner-Wilson, 2009

Diana Eng

You may recognize Diana‘s name from her stint on Project Runway a couple of years ago. She’s still going strong with wearable technology -  most recently authoring Fashion Geek and creating Fairytale Fashion, a collection with electronics and shape-changing garments which integrated feedback from the public through her website during the design process. For extra geek points, she also covers ham radio for Make magazine!

Twinkle Dress and EL Wire Dress - Diana Eng, 2010

Syuzi Pakhchyan

Syuzi wrote Fashioning Technology, the first book that I picked up on the subject of soft circuitry, and runs a community by the same name. Syuzi is great about encouraging more people to experiment in the field – the Fashioning Tech community is very welcoming, and she regularly shares the projects that members blog about there.

ePuppets - Syuzi Pakhchyan, 2008

Alison Lewis

Alison is the founder of SWITCH and author of SwitchCraft. She also teaches at the Parsons School of Design, and brings a more high-fashion perspective to her work. I was incredibly flattered when she recently featured my Skirt Full of Stars on SWITCH.

Rodarte-style Lighted Heels - Alison Lewis, 2010

Becky Stern

Becky may have done more to spread the word of DIY soft circuitry than anyone else. As Associate Editor at MAKE and CRAFT, she frequently shares wearable tech projects and has produced a couple of CRAFT videos about wearables. She also teaches soft circuit workshops (I had to miss the one at Urban Craft Uprising in Seattle last summer because I didn’t have anyone else working my booth), and sells soft circuit starter kits through her company, Sternlab.

Lilypad Embroidery - Becky Stern, 2008

Lynne Bruning

‘Textile Enchantress’ Lynne makes absolutely stunning garments that frequently involve things like electronics or UV-reactive materials. She has also generously shared quite a few instructables of soft circuitry techniques. I’m particularly fascinated by the work she’s been doing using smart fashion to assist impaired individuals – like this sonar garment for the visually impaired.

Bats Have Feelings Too - Lynne Bruning, 2009

Angela Sheehan

Creator of the blog Soft Circuit Saturdays, Angela is another maker who has been diving deeply into wearable electronics. I love seeing what another dedicated explorer who is not a professional in the field comes up with!

Temperature Sensing Cup Sleeve - Angela Sheehan, 2009

Interested in seeing more posts honoring women in science and tech? Check out the list of posts over at Finding Ada, or follow the #ald10 tag on twitter.

I really like these Emission Spectra scarves from Becky Stern. I’ve actually been kicking around an emission spectrum bracelet idea for about six months now, but the picture I have in my head requires metalworking skills and tools I don’t have. Seeing this makes me want to revisit the idea, though, and try to find another means of interpreting it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCmsvXgxdDY

I was also really intrigued by the ideas from Fabian Hemmert’s TEDx talk on ways a mobile device could provide information kinesthetically. I’m not so sure I’d want a “breathing” mobile, but changing the center of mass seems like it could be a really useful way of providing output. (via information aesthetics)

I just discovered Not So Humble Pie, who came up with these fabulous misfortune cookies. She also recently did a couple of awesome science cookie roundups.

N Building, in Tokyo, is a concept building with an interesting augmented reality twist. Instead of putting up signs, the building facade is a QR code; reading it on a mobile device delivers you to a website with a tenant list and other information.The developers also created an iPhone application that allows building occupants to interact with passersby through their phones -- showing what’s behind the windows, overlaying speech bubbles, and the like. (via Rhizome)

I can’t imagine anything like this taking off if every building had its own separate app, but I could definitely envision it integrated into a product like Google Maps.

This has to qualify as one of the most incredible projects I have seen in a long time. Carlos Alberto, a craftsman in Portugal, hand built this gorgeous wooden Vespa.

No, that’s not just veneer covering a stock Vespa body.  His page shows photos from the full sequence of the build, from the initial sketch to the final product zooming down the road, which make it quite clear that the body of this scooter is solid wood.

I love the level of detail here… from the precise matching of the curves to the original, to the inlay on the wheels. How amazing would it be to ride to work on this?

(via Make)

This is one of the more fascinating ideas I have run across recently… A steampunk cellphone created by designer Arthur Schmitt. The basics are all there – earpiece at the top, mouthpiece at the bottom, and two gauges that I can only assume display battery and signal strength.

What about the keypad? Well, he did away with it in favor of a great geeky touch – in order to dial a number, you use one of the little punch cards shown in the second picture. Punch out the phone number, slip the card into the bottom of the phone, and away you go!

I can just imagine using one of these all the time… instead of scrolling through your phone list, you’d be flipping through a wallet of cards – each one could be different, as show in the picture. You could even punch the number out of a photo, or someone’s business card, as long as you got it down to the right size to fit into the phone.

Sure, it’s not really practical… large contact lists would require big rolodexes or the like, for one. But is such a novel, tactile spin on things that it is fun to consider.

Via MAKE, who found it on Unpluggd.

It’s official! I posted my first item on my etsy shop this weekend – and I have a few more that are just awaiting a second coat of sealant and some good photos before they can be added. I’ve been holding off on really directing anyone to this site until I got all of the sections up and put some items up for sale – now that both of those milestones have been reached, it’s time to start getting my name out there. I’m still figuring out where and how to do that, but at very least I’m ready to pass the address out to friends…

I’ve also been busily working away on my second Ponoko order – Though I’ll be waiting until they launch their new Prime service and metal options before I submit it. This time I’ll also be making my first attempt at a 3-D design, a trinket box that should hopefully hold together sturdily with no glue or fastening hardware.

Really, it’s kind of amazing how I’ve been bubbling over with ideas since I decided to start Polymath… too many to reasonably focus on at once. I keep having to just add things to my sketchbook and decide which ones should wait until later. At the moment, anything involving electronics is likely to stay on the back burner until after the holidays unless it comes in as a custom work request. Thank goodness for Moleskines and Maker’s Notebooks! I keep a soft-sided graph paper moleskine in my purse to capture and rough out the ideas that strike when I’m out and about, and the larger, hardback Maker’s Notebook at home for the things that require further planning. (For anyone interested, I got my Maker’s Notebook free with my subscription to MAKE: magazine, and the offer is still going, though I’m not sure for how long. Use code TGAWK on their subscription page.)

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love the costumes, and the spookiness, and the sense of fun and playfulness that seems to me to be more entrenched in Halloween than any of the other major holidays.

This year we had plans to head up to Seattle to attend a Halloween party with Sean’s dad, but that fell through and we were left with about a week until the big day, with costumes arranged but nowhere to go. I did some searching online to find out what was happening in Portland, and found a great solution.

Portland Center Stage is currently showing a one man play about R. Buckminster Fuller – 20th century American architect, inventor, and philosopher, and namesake of the Carbon 60 atom, or buckyball. The play is running until December 7th and we had already determined that we wanted to go, but when I started looking around for a Halloween activity I came on a coupon code – in order to get some people into the theater on what would likely have been a very quiet night otherwise, PCS was selling Halloween-night tickets to Bucky for $8.50 each! Plus, they were throwing a party afterward with free snacks and drinks.

So on Friday night we got into our costumes and headed out to the theater. I found the play to be not only entertaining, but also inspiring… Fuller was a great proponent of “doing more with less” (which he called ephemeralization) and structuring things for the benefit of humanity as a whole. We were treated to a number of gems from his philosophies, his inventions, and his explorations of geometry, and it was overall a fun, interesting, thought-provoking evening. The play did a great job of covering the subject matter in a way that was very accessible, without being at all ‘dumbed down’, and if you’re interested in a kind of brainy, non-traditional play I’d highly recommend it.

One of the things Bucky says in the play that really stuck with me, particularly given what I was just writing about in here last week, was essentially that everyone is born a generalist, with vast stores of curiosity – we have to be, to handle all of the things that we learn in the first handful of years we’re alive. But then society knocks it out of us, encouraging specialization because specialists are easier to handle, more predictable.

I think I’ll be doing some more exploring into the writings and other creations of Mr. Fuller, and I’m also contemplating adding a tribute to him in my product line now.