Smart acts: intelligent products

Tiles and textiles that clean the air or warm your rear, capes that grow flowery in the rain - new technology offers a riot of surprisingly fun materials, as Barbara Chandler reports.

Now you don't see it. Now you do. Clever umbrellas by London College of Fashion graduates Emma-Jayne Parkes and Viviane Jaeger of SquidLondon only show their full pattern when wet. If not exactly singing in the rain, at least you may feel more cheerful. This entertaining idea has gone global since the first London skyline design, with customers including MoMA in New York. The girls have just added a shower curtain and a rain cape to the range - when watered, the shower curtain grows a jaunty array of pretty bottles, and the rain cape (launching in March) will burst into flower.

The Squid squad are exploiting what in techno speak are "smart" or "intelligent" materials. These have in-built technology that makes them react to their environment or to a stimulus from their user. They might be activated by light, for example, or electricity, touch/pressure, movement, moisture/water, acidity, change of temperature or magnetism.

It's an area of design and architecture that has exploded recently, with applications way beyond colour and pattern.

How about porcelain tiles that purify the air by breaking down nitrogen dioxide and give off oxygen under light? (From ecofriendlytiles.co.uk).

Similarly RCA graduate Lauren Bowker has made textiles that monitor and neutralise pollution (pdcl2.com). "Intelligent glass" is a clear winner, activated by a very small electric current. Piva-Lite goes cloudy for instant privacy or security, and E-Glas cuts condensation and can even melt snow. Thermovit is used for 100 per cent energy-efficient mirrored glass radiators. Gaining ground are "phase change materials" (PCMs) such as textiles and plaster that can store and then release heat. Very new are safe paints that conduct electricity like a wire for lighting (bareconductive.com). In the pipeline are road coatings that can absorb, store and ultimately release energy from traffic.

London's Mr Materials is consultant Chris Lefteri, whose books and exhibition displays at shows like autumn's 100% Design have blown away designers worldwide.

"Twentieth-century innovations gave us products that changed our lives, and are easy to evaluate, often simply by looking, But today's smart materials work under the radar - they are doing, or can do, all kinds of clever things in ways not immediately apparent."

At SCIN, a just-opened "materials gallery" in Clerkenwell, director Annabelle Filer perches on top of her black desk. She gets up to reveal a white wood-grained mark. "It's thermo-
chromic," she laughs, "basically, registering the heat of my bum ... or my coffee cup, or the imprint of my hand." Joking apart, Filer has a clutch of seriously smart stuff to show architects, interior decorators, product designers and the public, too. An infrared textile stores body heat and pumps it back into the body (good for cushions on outside benches); other fabrics go rigid on impact (accident protection) or thicker when stretched (blast protection). There are plastics that "self-heal" when scratched, and self-cleaning ceramic and concrete.

"These materials are driving design," she adds. "I call it Chinese whispers - people come to check out something so wondrous they thought it was a rumour."