Here I’d keep a diary of each day’s activities during the residency at the Tinkering Studio, Exploratorium. We’d tinker with linkages, eventually participating in the Bay Area Maker Faire.
I arrived in Exploratorium, thrilled and worried but the first day went really smoothly. Everybody welcomed me and we had a tinkering session to see how LINKKI works and how it could be brought to participatory activities in the Maker Faire. Having already experienced at playing with linkages and mechanisms, they were quite quick to make functioning movements though it still took time for them to figure out how to use each parts. Especially the fasteners made problems often so that it made me consider designing one myself. Nevertheless, it was interesting to see diverse results such as Tickling machine , Fly, Pray Mantis and so on so forth. Then we talked about the plan for Maker Faire but most of them were still up in the air.
On the second day, I tried to make an additional circles that would be compatible with Lego parts. Designing LINKKI, the compatibility was one of the main concern cause LINKKI itself was made as medium that would be placed between raw material and polished toys. Luckily, LINKKI turned out to work quite well with Lego parts and motors. In the afternoon, there was a meeting for the informal learning group where educators, researchers as well as Tinkering Studio staffs gathered. I was not familiar with some of the topics discussed there but it was still interesting to see what’s going on. And finally Maker Faire plan got clearer. It is having a LINKKI corner inside the Tinkering Studio booth where I could show an installation and organize participatory activities. I was more worried than thrilled in the beginning but soon did I get excited with the opportunity to have a separate corner and meet people with the toy I designed.
On the third day, we discussed the activities in the Maker Faire in detail. They were interested in the theme ‘Dancing Machine’ so that we talked about the two stages of activities: one for the beginner and the other for the more interested. I drew quite a few different legs such as animal’s, human and table legs. In the evening, we dropped by Heron Art Center to see a small automata exhibition. My favorite was Paul Spooner’s which is very simple but full of details. There was the time when I was quite fascinated in characters and puppeteering but now I feel that I’m more into minimalism and abstract construction. That might have led me to shift from Mechanical Cartoon to LINKKI.
The fourth day was dedicated to hold an activity on the museum floor. I lasercut legs and made a few presets that could help people get the idea of what’s going on. Because we opened the door at lunch time on weekday, there are not many people around. There were less than 10 participants most of whom looked under 12 who didn’t have enough time to stay there more than 10 minutes. Even though I tried to make the experience as simple as possible by giving a basic mechanism ready, I found out that it could be challenging for them to start from a scratch without any prior knowledge of linkage mechanism. When I first organized a workshop in Korea, their age ranged from 15 to 40 and a brief lecture about the mechanism was given so that they were quite quick to understand and build functioning mechanisms. But it was not the case this time. We seems to need even more simple solution for the Maker Faire activities.
