The joy of distributed making
When Covid19 forced us to stay home we started thinking about hosting a day of distributed making. With the event we aimed to create a welcoming place where makers could scratch an itch, share ideas, collaborate, learn, test and together have fun during home office hours. “Physical connections at a distance” seemed like the perfect topic to explore in this first edition.
Riff on your ideas and solutions with like minded makers
More and more participants are adding ideas they want to work on to the participant page. Take a look. Maybe it inspires you or maybe you find a participant that can use your expertise. Some of the ideas already on there:
Another place to look, is our slack channel. There are already conversations on ideas people want to work on and inspirational projects by others are shared. As Lorenzo mentioned: “I am missing discussing ideas with people like this so much!”
Hop from room to room or stick around for long conversations
Many participants enjoyed having conversations with others. Every participant opened a personal Jitsi-stream that made it easy to hop from room to room to experience what others were busy with, or drop a specific question.
End results
Share the results
We ended the day with a round of show & tell by anyone who wanted to share their results:
Things that were explored and prototyped were:
- Iskander worked on using haptic cues for parallel conversations
- Thomas created a personal light frame for video conferencing that is controlled by others in the call
- Tjeerd dived into connecting a Tacx bike machine
- Dries was building xmas lights for your home, controlled by your favourite neighbours
- Gerrit created a remote hide and seek with paper maps
- Adrian turned a cheap ESP camera module into a nature cam to keep track of the animals in your garden
- Michael created a lightning fast machine to send physical fist bumps across the internet
- Lorenzo created a weird video chat platform (which we used to host our drinks afterwards)
- Pieter created midi controlled office chairs for music performances or boring online meetings
Gerrit shared a post on his idea before the day, Iskander improved on his haptic exploration in this post, Lorenzo invites you to contribute to his weird chat room and Michael’s fistbump code can be found here.
Thank you!
We want to thank all participants (and people who joined us for the show and tell) for a wonderful day! And a special thank you to Thomas and Adrian for providing valuable feedback in preparation to the event. We would love to do this more often and hope to see you there.