Category: Press

Forbes Privacy Wearables

Forget Glass. Here Are Wearables That Protect Your Privacy. on Forbes by Kashmir Hill:

Clothing has historically played an important role in protecting our privacy, namely by covering up our “private parts.” But it can do even more to protect us. At hacker conference Hope X, designer Becky Stern of Adafruit gave a whirlwind tour of “disruptive wearable technology” — “disruptive” not in the Silicon Valley “oh-my-god-the-iWatch-is-coming” sense but in that it interferes with people’s attempts to invade your physical and virtual space. Instead of defending against lances and swords, this modern armor promises to thwart surveillance cameras, TSA agents, drone strikes, subway crowding, and cellular connectivity. For the most part, the wearables are more fashionable than wearing a tin foil hat.

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Profile on Technical.ly Brooklyn

Adafruit’s wearables director will show you how to light up a room (literally) on Technical.ly by Brady Dale:

Fort Greene’s Becky Stern is Adafruit’s director of wearable electronics. If you’re not familiar with the company, it makes a bunch of components that make it easier to make gadgets. It’s all about helping its users learn more about making more stuff.

To that end, Stern is an online personality for the company, teaching new projects every week over YouTube and encouraging the DIY spirit.

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Lifehacker Interview: I’m Becky Stern, and This Is How I Work

Lifehacker Interview: How I Work

Is Becky Stern an artist or engineer or designer? At Adafruit Industries, it’s all of the above. As Director of Wearable Electronics, Becky combines her DIY skills with crafting talents to build cool gizmos that utilize all sorts of electronic components.

You might recognize Becky from her work at MAKE, her Youtube videos, or her Adafruit tutorials where she shown how to make everything from RFID rings to pixel hearts. How does Becky pull it all off? We caught up with her to learn about Becky’s favorite gear and work habits.

Location: Work in west SoHo, NYC, live in Brooklyn

Current Gig: Director of Wearable Electronics, Adafruit

One word that best describes how you work: Speedboat

Current mobile device: Nexus 4 running CyanogenMod

Current computer: 27″ iMac

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Interview in Makers at Work

I was interviewed for Steven Osborn’s book Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time

As you’ll see from the 21 interviews in Makers at Work, inquisitive makers are just as apt to pick up a laser cutter or an Arduino as a wrench to fashion something new. For example, you’ll meet Jeri Ellsworth, who might provide a video lecture on magnetic logic one day and a tutorial on welding a roll bar on a stock car the next. You’ll also meet Eben Upton, who put cheap, powerful computing in the hands of everyone with the Raspberry Pi; Becky Stern, who jazzes up clothing with sensors and LEDs; and bunnie Huang, who knows the ins and outs of the Shenzhen, China, electronics parts markets as well as anyone. As all the interviews in Makers at Work show, makers have something in common: reverence for our technical past coupled with an aversion to convention. If they can’t invent new processes or products, it’s simply not worth doing.

Crazy as foxes, makers—working in the spirit of Tesla, Wozniak, Edison, Gates, Musk and many others—can bring sophisticated products to the people or to the market as fast or faster than large corporations. And they are not just enabling new technologies and devices—they are changing the way these devices are funded, manufactured, assembled, and delivered.

Download a PDF of my interview