Highlight of the DIY for CHI workshop that I attended during the CHI 2009 conference was a little session done by Hannah Perner-Wilson on the design of flexible/fabric circuits. Just finding out about Velostat and Eeontex, two materials she uses heavily in her work, made it worth while. The later is particularly useful for making linear touch sensors.
I really likethis idea by Kacie Kinzer of “robots” ( she calls them tweenbots) that rely on the kindness of strangers to get from A to B.
"The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”
It must have been a pain for the guys at Nearfield to draw all these little dotted circles, but it’s an effective way of highlighting the quantity of wi-fi devices of one sort or another around us.
This is excellent fun. Make your own highly stylised cartoon strips. Naturally, I’ve gone with a very amusing topic for my first one. How very British.
I saw the textile work of Hillu Liebelt in the January issue of Crafts magazine, and really loved the installation pieces of textile heads on thin wire stands that she created.
She has a show entitled “Delicate Matters” that’s just started in the UK at the Platform Gallery in Clitheroe in rural Lancashire if anyone is in the area. A little out of the way for me, unfortunately.
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