Soft Robots and Talking T-Shirts in Heidelberg

Last weekend I was kindly invited to Heidelberg by my amazing artist friend Anna Donska to conduct two wearable workshops together at Kulturfenster. Anna is offering all sorts of drawing workshops and museum excursions (check out her blog for bright and resourceful pictures). Unfortunately, Anna caught a bad cold, so I ended up doing the second workshop on my own. And I even managed to take the cold home, as a little souvenir from Heidelberg. ))

The first day was dedicated to making Talking T-Shirts (the same technical concept I've used previously for Speaking Bags), for children from age 8. As usual, I offered the participants to create their own soft buttons. However, to my surprise, most of them decided to keep the original "hard" button of the sound module and concentrate on the design of the shirt. And even more surprisingly, despite the absence of real technical challenges, we were struggling with the timing in the end. I must also add that I was very disappointed with the sound modules I ordered for this workshop. I've always had many issues with those, but this time I think half of them stopped working by the end of the workshop, which was rather frustrating... (I think I need eHaJo people make one for my workshops.)

 

One of my resolutions this year is to become more open source and open data. So here is a list of materials and tools needed, and I also attach my hand-out with the instructions.
Materials: - paper and pencil for sketching and planing
- T-Shirt
- re-recordable sound-module
- thread
- felt and fabric left-overs
- fabric glue or hot glue gun
- conductive thread

Tools:
- needle
- scissors
- cable stripper

 


Speaking Bag by Anna Blumenkranz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The second workshop, which I ran on my own, was a Soft Robot one, aimed at families. I have never done it for an audience like this before, (though, I used to have totally mixed workshops) and I just loved the concept! There was one father-son team, and two two-kids-one-mum teams. The atmosphere was great and laid-back, and every team finished the electric part by the end. Here is everything we've used in this workshop:

Materials:
- felt
- fiberfill
- two LEDs
- cell coin battery 3V
- battery holder
- conductive thread

Tools:
- needle
- scissors
- pliers 

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Possible buttons:

For Velcro Buttons:
- Two pieces of velcro
- conductive thread
- opt: felt

For conductive pompom: 
- thick knitting yarn
- conductive thread
- two round pieces of cardboard with a whole in the middle

For Stroke Sensor:
- felt
- conductive thread

Many thanks to lovely and hospitable Anna, friendly Kulturfenster & Ulla, and beautiful sunny Heidelberg!

Soft Robots / Kuschelroboter by Anna Blumenkranz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.