NOTES

We’ve come to the end of the latest series of AccessLab workshops. This post is a debrief on how we’ve progressed and a review of the feedback.

We've repurposed our maypole robots so people can dance together safely (woven robots don't need to social distance).

Evaluation of the viruscraft game - what do people learn from playing it, and does it result in any misunderstandings? Also a summary of questions and answers from our virus Ask-Me-Anything session.

We’ve been awarded seed funding to pilot a new system to encourage and facilitate scientific researchers to work with their local councils, providing on-demand advice on scientific issues to fit the needs of councillors, and perhaps also passing on the skills to find and use scientific information.

A review of the FoAM Kernow studio's activities from 2020.

We are looking to appoint a Non-Executive Director for the FoAM Kernow studio for one year, to build our new advisory team.

After successfully performing maypole dances and creating simple twists and weaves with hundreds of passers by at the Algomech festival in Sheffield, we noticed how much people like to interact with our woven robots - wanting to help or direct their actions by picking them up and trying to understand what they are doing.

As we are interested in tangible programming - where we move code from its conventional …

While processor speeds and the use of computation in our society have increased enormously, it is significant that the materials of electronics construction itself (discrete components soldered on to resin printed circuit boards) has been broadly consistent for well over fifty years.

The Penelope project is concerned with re-evaluating histories of textile technologies with mathematical and scientific thought. The emergence of “wearable electronics”, in particular inspiration from Penelope collaborators and …

An update on the Sonic Kayak project, including a chance to give us some feedback.

Results from our survey - an attempt at developing our environmental data sonification approach to be both enjoyable but also interpretable.

Making an AccessLab event work online. This post covers changes we made to the workshop format, what worked and what didn't, and what we'd do differently next time.

For some time we have been prioritising tools and processes that can be reused for different purposes in times where infrastructure is failing. Part of our COVID-19 response to the above problems has been to refit a small garden shed with a solar power setup (from our Sonic Kayak workshops) so we can run one of our CNC machines more or less unsupervised*, slowly churning out small parts for …

Notes on our new turbidity and air quality sensor designs for the Sonic Kayak project, to allow fine scale mapping of above and below water pollution.

We're redesigning Viruscraft for a new project on virus and host co-evolution with Dr. Ben Ashby at the University of Bath. This post explores the options we're considering and why.

Austin Houldsworth's words, images and video from his 2019 Eden Project/FoAM Invisible Worlds residency - the Intergalactic Space Agency.

Following our workshop with visually impaired people at Trevassack we were left with mixed feelings, on the one hand the participants were very happy and seemed inspired by the day - but on the other hand we experienced plenty of technical difficulties with the new GPS system, and we didn't have enough time to really get into sonic mapping.

The important thing was that the participants gave us so much …

As part of our Sonic Kayak project, we have been looking at adding new sensors to the system. These are our notes from our research and prototyping.

Notes from a sound mapping workshop for the Sonic Kayaks, with participants with visual impairments.

After two workshops and the testing day at the Eden Project we took the final version of Viruscraft out to Science in the Square: a big event run by Exeter university with around 3,000 visitors. It was a fantastically rainy day, which meant lots of budding virus builders of all ages took shelter in the big tent in the middle of Falmouth during peak holiday season. The installation turned out …

Last week we ran an AccessLab for anyone interested in climate change or involved with Extinction Rebellion. This is to document how it went and what our next steps could be.