Interactive jacket designed for connecting

Design entrepreneur Henk-Jan Room has created an interactive jacket that’s meant to promote more meaningful human connections. The jacket connects to a smart phone and to social media via an app. The wearer can select preferences with the app, and based on these choices, the jacket communicates through light with other people as soon as they are nearby and match the wearer’s interests.

The designer envisions possibilities beyond dating and networking, with spontaneous encounters and public events, such as music festivals, enhanced by the jacket’s responses to its environment, or the beat of the music.

Room is the founder of Room for Concepts. From his studio in The Hague, Netherlands, he devises his own projects as well as working on client commissions. Room for Concepts draws on a range of expertise in ideation, design, technical function and producibility. His background in industrial product design, combined with a solid network of designers, manufacturers and software programmers, drives new concepts from theory to execution.