The World's Fair

This is ecological design of a completely different sort than our last post. And product design at its most beach-like. The bikini, part of a student project displayed at the ITP Winter Show, "cools your beer and charges your iPod! (With a USB connection!)." ITP, incidentally, is the Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Says, Andrew Schneider , the creator: "The suit is a standard medium-sized bikini swimsuit retrofitted with 1" x 4" photovoltaic film strips sewn together in series with conductive thread. The cells terminate in a 5 volt regulator into a female [of course!] USB connection."

I suppose the engineering design process involved three steps:

1) What are the top three things I daydream about?
2) How can I combine these interests?
3) Solar-celled bikini.

(This is the part of the post where the second bikini was gonna be posted.)

Here is the "User Scenario" (because I know you were wondering):

The suit is worn like a regular bathing suit. Wear it to the beach, find a nice spot in the sun, get out your iPod and plug in to the retractable female USB connection sprouting discreetly from the hip. As soon as your iPod is all charged up, cool that frosty beverage that's been warming in your bag by plugging in the beverage cooler (peltier junction) to the same USB connection. It couldn't be simpler.

Onward and upward? This one somehow offers a strange juxtaposition to yesterday's "women in science" article in the NYT that Tara posted about and that deserves wider attention: i.e., the women and science issue is a subset of the women and society issue, and the iBikini has something to do with the women and society issue.