Engineers are often admired for their wide variety of skills and traits – creativity, intelligence, innovation, the list goes on and on. One thing that rarely turns up on this list however, is fashion. Aside from standard suit combinations, or sweatpants and free t-shirts most engineers don’t really put much thought into their daily outfits aside from making sure that they have one on. This is mainly why I was so surprised to find out that Janet Hansen, the founder of the ridiculously cool Enlighted Designs Inc. is an engineering grad from UCSD.
Hansen, the self-proclaimed Chief Fashion Engineer of her own company since 1998, didn’t start anywhere near the fashion world. She started her undergrad degree in the 80’s and graduated with her bachelors in engineering in 1990. She continued on to complete a masters and PhD in applied mechanics and engineering science/bioengineering from UC San Diego. She also co-authored several academic papers focused on red blood cell membrane structure. Hansen was fully submerged in the engineering world, and quite frankly she was kicking some serious butt while she was at it.
After making the leap from bioengineering to aerospace engineering, Hansen eventually found herself working on a collaboration project with MIT – the wearable technology fashion show. She was the one behind the making the ‘dudes in tubes’ costumes (YouTube it, it’s really impressive). Following the show she received a call from ‘Flyer Man’, an infamous figure from the Las Vegas strip who hands out advertising flyers was looking for a jacket with his infamous name on the back. It was after this that her business began to take off, since then she’s worked with Daft Punk, MIA, Katy Perry, Pink, and many more mainstream artists.
In the process of becoming more fashion designer than engineer, Hansen has yet to lose her technical charm. All of the technology required for her to make all of her impressive clothing is designed and constructed by Hansen. She’s designed and constructed her own circuit boards on small chips that can be held within a single piece of clothing, allowing any given article to have multiple lights that often change colours or light up in an interesting pattern. Kanye West’s light-up ‘beating’ heart accessory that he wore for a series of performances was a completely unique creation by Hansen from start to finish. Her innovation in her design has also earned her a few patents along the way, just to make sure she has official bragging rights.
While watching some of the short-documentary style videos of Hansen that have popped up online, I couldn’t get over how soft-spoken and down to earth she is. When you look at her credentials and what she’s accomplished on paper, it’s straight-up impressive, and somewhat intimidating. In her interviews however, she sounds so humbled by this whole experience that she’s had thus far – show business has yet to get to her, if it ever will. In my opinion, she’s essentially the epitome of both class and success for an engineer, especially for a woman in engineering. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to shop her collection of light-up bras and pants.
Ethan
Now let's talk about power consumption. Energy cost money and if we find a way to use it more efficiently we save money. Regular rope lights use around 3 watts per foot and LED rope lights 1 watt. This is three times difference. Maybe few watts are not an important matter for you but think about them as an entire working system that you want to build. If they work all the time it will not be the same if you pay for 1 kW or for 3 kW if we say that your system is 1000 feet long. Or on a larger scale we can think about how efficient we as human beings use the energy on which we depend.