I spent all day Sunday at the Maker Faire, but probably didn't come close to seeing everything. Whoever is marketing & organizing this thing, they are doing a great job. Besides the wonderfully obsessed DIYers showing off personal projects like a 205-pound bicycle or clothing that requires batteries, the place hosted a variety of kit-oriented vendors & was crowded with families. There's no recession here. Probably the only things that didn't draw huge audiences were the many speaker presentations.
I especially liked seeing the large-scale Burning Man constructions. My favorite was an operatically sized pair of metal wings, which is completed by a person standing in a ring in its center as the whole thing rotates. I also enjoyed the provocative mechanical sculptures in the Applied Kinetic Arts booth.
The Steampunk aesthetic was quite conspicuous at the show, especially on the movement's strangely enticing adherents, whose Victorian-inspired attire always seems to include goggles & corsets.A discovery at the show for me was Arduino, an open-source platform for components that allow you to build your own smart devices. For the electronics & computer geeks, there was plenty of compare-and-contrast discussion over the many packaged versions of Arduino hardware. It's the kind of the thing that might just force me to learn how to solder.
No comments:
Post a Comment