Ada Lovelace Day: Leah Buechley
This is a post for Ada Lovelace Day, about a woman in tech whom I admire. And my woman in tech is Leah Buechley, who is a smart innovator in a new and wonderful field, plus a great educator.
Leah Buechley is an expert in the field of electronic textiles (e-textiles). Her work includes developing a method for creating cloth printed circuit boards (fabric PCBs), paper computing, and (most exciting to me) designing the LilyPad Arduino, a toolkit that enables people to build soft, flexible, fabric-based computers and to blend textile craft, electrical engineering, and programming.
She also gives talks and workshops on the subject of electronic textiles and using the Lilypad Arduino - lovely, motivating events that bring together people from fashion and technology backgrounds. And also people who are just starting out in either subject 
Leah is now an Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directs the High-Low Tech research group. They state their primary aim as "to engage diverse audiences in designing and building their own technologies by situating computation in new cultural and material contexts, and by developing tools that democratize engineering. We believe that the future of technology will be largely determined by end-users who will design, build, and hack their own devices, and our goal is to inspire, shape, support, and study these communities. To this end, we explore the intersection of computation, physical materials, manufacturing processes, traditional crafts, and design."
24-03-2009
