Open Style Lab

GBH reporter Megan Smith spotlights Open Style Lab, a nonprofit founded at MIT that aims to make fashion more accessible. Yasmin Keats, executive director of Open Style Lab, notes that the organization was founded in 2014 at MIT’s International Design Center to “show what was possible in fashion. We also looked at the importance of design and style and how it can change not only the way that you see yourself — but also looked at how it can be a vehicle to change the way that the world views disability.”

Open Style Lab, a nonprofit initially started as a summer project at MIT in 2014 that is aimed at making fashion more accessible for people who are disabled, designed clothes for “Double Take,” a fashion event dedicated to raising awareness about the lives and needs of people with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), reports Matthew Herper for STAT. 

The Guardian’s DG McCullough highlights MIT’s Open Style Lab, which merges design, engineering and occupational therapy to create clothes for people with disabilities, and the International Design Center, which creates clothes with “fewer sensory triggers such as fraying, rough zippers and scratchy tags children and adults with autism because of their sensitivity to certain textures and colors.”

Researchers at the MIT Open Style Lab are creating products for people with disabilities in an attempt to fill a void in the clothing industry, writes Dana Guth for Boston Magazine. “More people suffer from these problems than you would ever realize looking at the market,” says Grace Jun, the lab’s executive director. 

Grace Jun, education director of MIT’s Open Style Lab, speaks to Marisa Dellatto of The Boston Globe about the lab’s work developing clothes designed to empower individuals with unique needs and their fashion show at the MIT Museum. Jun says she was inspired to develop inclusive clothing designs when she saw the potential wearable tech had to help people.

In a Wall Street Journal article about designing clothing for people with disabilities, Christina Binkley highlights the MIT Open Style Lab. The program brings together students to create apparel for varying needs, including “flat seams that don’t irritate the skin of children with sensory disorders and rain coats that cover wheelchair users’ laps more effectively.”

MIT students collaborated with residents of the Boston Home, a facility for adults with neurological diseases, to create InstaAid, an app that acts as a call button for nurses on the campus, writes Virgie Hoban for The Boston Globe. “The app preserves the independence of people contending with debilitating diseases," Hoban explains. 

Boston Globe reporter Kathleen Burge writes about the MIT Open Style Lab, which was founded by MIT graduate Grace Teo to bring together teams of students to “design clothing for clients with amputations, spinal cord injuries, early-onset arthritis, and other disabilities.”

In this news video, The Boston Globe reports on the MIT Open Style Laboratory, where teams of design, engineering and occupational therapy students combine forces to design accessible fashion.  

Andrea Timpano writes for Boston Magazine about how students at the Open Style Lab are designing fashionable and functional clothing for people with disabilities. “What we’ve noticed is even if you have the best intentions, the best product, the most helpful technology, if it doesn’t look great, people don’t want to wear it,” explains MIT graduate Grace Teo.