🍂Wabi-Sabi Electronics

The sterile, intimidating and needy digital devices that we’ve created can benefit from a wonderful Japanese tradition known as wabi-sabi. This is an aesthetic and world view that prioritizes naturalness, imperfection, simplicity, tranquility and humility. These qualities may seem the very opposite of digital electronics, and today they largely are.

The dehumanizing mechanization of modern life leads many of us into stress, anxiety, and depression. Each new electronic invention seems to take us further from the natural world, and into more rigidly ordered states. But it doesn’t have to be this way! By designing with humane intent, we can create digital and physical experiences that nourish the soul and feed the human spirit. We can get closer to nature, improve our outlook, ease our worries and regain our peace of mind.

This session will take you on a hands-on journey to discover how incorporating wabi-sabi principles into the design of electronic devices can produce calmer, and more organically humane interactions that support our overall well-being. We will mix crickets with microchips, motors with meditation and create connections through the wind. Armed with these and other inspirations, you can begin building your own beautiful, useful and humane wabi-sabi inspired devices.

This introduction will be followed later in the month by two related workshops:

1. Stillness Detector Workshop - participants will be provided with a pre-constructed "stillness detector" that waits for viewers to be motionless before triggering a kinetic artwork or other interactive piece.

2. Nature API Workshop - introduces an easy method for obtaining a wide variety of real-time natural phenomena (weather, geophysical, astronomical) on a microcontroller, to help create artworks and devices that bring people closer to nature.