Fashion always offered the ability to break the ice by complimenting a stranger at a party who wears something you like. This new project called ‘Social Textiles’ is aimed at turning fashion into a wearable social network that alerts you when a friend is in the neighbourhood and lights up among the like-minded to attract their attention. It’s the latest instalment of MIT’s Tangible Media Group and Fluid Interface Group, a design team that creates everything from shapeshifting displays to reinvented power cords. The Social Textiles project began when a group of MIT students – Viirj Kan, Katsuya Fujii, Judith Amores, and Chang Long Zhu Jin – questioned how tech could make social media more tangible: “If you think about it, our Facebook and Twitter profiles reach and even impact thousands of people every day, but it doesn’t feel like it,” Kan explained to Co.Design. “But while the way we represent ourselves in social media is intangible, what we wear isn’t. We wanted to see if we could merge the two to create social catalysts.”

For now, the project only entails a T-shirt but in theory it could be integrated in any piece of clothing. The front of the tee features a pattern printed in thermochromatic ink, combined with a thin circuit membrane underneath. The T-shirt pairs with your smartphone through Bluetooth and detects when other users in the room share your interests. A buzz is then sent through the collar when you’re within 12 feet of each other. If you touch the person you’re in sync with – shaking their hand or patting them on the shoulder – a capacitive sensor in the shirt can tell and will light up the shirt, revealing on the front what you have in common: “Depending on how the ink pattern is designed, Social Textiles can communicate anything you want,” Kan says. “It could tell two people who have just met that they both like jazz, or that they both go to MIT.”

More information on the project can be found here.