Cutie LED Safety Vest

As a bike commuter, I was looking for some visibility gear to keep me safe. As a fashionable young woman, I was disappointed to find all visibility gear looks the same; boxy, boring, and not cute at all.

Enter the cutie LED safety vest. It’s designed to be optimized for cuteness, and comfort. High visibility gear for professional use follows a strict set of standards and I want to be clear this is not to be used in those situations. However, it is perfect for everyday use in situations like biking, jogging, pride parades or other non professional settings.

The Design

• High visibility fabric: Something like safety ripstop nylon. Ideally I would like to use a recycled nylon. Vest will be two layers, and insides and outside.
• Breathable mesh back and front: Something like this spacer mesh and lighter mesh to sandwich the LED strips, but still allow breathability.
• LEDs: See writing diagrams below
• Cute Reflective Designs: For extra visibility. See wiring diagram below.
• Adjustable sides and fronts: Small plastic buckles and webbing to allow better size inclusivity and comfort.
• Pockets!: Obviously 😏. Zippers for security!

Color and Artwork Options

I designed several different options for the reflective patches and tape. These are meant to be examples and are not set in stone. If this is an item to sell, I would do additional user research to determine what would do well. Additionally I think this could be executed in any high visibility color (though I am partial to pink).

LEDs

For the electronics I will be using nLiten LED strips and a re chargeable USB power bank (similar to this). A USB power bank will be easier for to most people to recharge than something like a lipo battery (another popular choice). It also is less waste then using non rechargeable batteries.

A few thoughts on sustainability

Sustainable fashion is an area of interest of mine. Designing sustainable fashion is a interesting trade off of trying to make innovations to improve our future, and "does this thing even need to exist?". For the most part, I did not design this with sustainability in mind. The point of this project is to create a necessary safety garment that is high-quality and cute. That being said, here are some ideas on how to make this product more sustainable in production.

Cutting the fabric to product little to no waste: Since I do not know what the size of the fabric that this will be manufactured, I did not attempt to do these optimizations now. By adding some extra seams, we could reduce fabric wastage. I do understand this increase manufacturing cost, but this is usually the tradeoff you have to make. The kind of fabric we would use doesn't really have stretch or a grainline, so piece things together oddly won't really effect the flow. It might perhaps add some bulk on the seaming.

Using Recycled Fabric: The obvious choice is using a recycled nylon, but from my research recycled fabric in high visibility colors are limited. An ideal situation for me however would be using old safety gear to create the product. In my research, I learned that the lifecycle for professional hi vis outwear is relatively short, since it needs to stay to a certain standard. This means mostly good gear has to be tossed. I would love to find supplier of old gear, which then we can turn into a new product. This does obviously complicated manufacturing, but the extra cost seems worth it to me. I don't think it would be possible in the constrains of this contest, but a interesting ideal never the less.

(no code purposefully since I don't have the hardware to test)

I hope you enjoy this project.

Best! Clarissa