vinyl
Mod your anything!
One of the many advantages of having a dedicated space on the museum floor is that it allows for quick and relatively easy experimenting with ideas for activities that do not need to be fully worked out yet. We tried out something last week that came about a little serendipitously.
A while ago, while visiting Leah Buechley’s lab at MIT, we saw a great little vinyl cutting machine, called the Craft ROBO. They were using it to design circuit and cut them out of copper foil, so that they would be easy to sew onto fabric.
Since it was relatively cheap, we decided to get one and play around with it. As mentioned before, one of the earliest application that excited me was cutting vinyl decals to decorate my laptop.
Last week, the Exploratorium hosted a three-day event called Rods and Mods, which invited computer hackers and modders to showcase their creations on the museum floor.
We thought it would be fun to set up a little station inviting visitors to design, print out, and apply their own mods for laptops, cellphones, wallets, water bottles, etc. Pretty much anything that would take a vinyl sticker was fair game.
Kids got to design their own creations, using the exceedingly intuitive software LiveBrush. and then go through the steps of choosing the type of vinyl that they wanted, sending the file to the vinyl cutter (often watching captivated as the machine did its thing), carefully peel away the background, burnish the design onto transfer tape, and finally transferring it to their object of choice.
The photos we took show the unmistakable pride that each visitor took in their creations, and the sense of ownership of the experience that results from that.
You can see more photos from the event by clicking the banner below:
Cutting vinyl
The latest addition to the Learning Studio growing arsenal of fabrication tools is a desktop vinyl cutter, the adorable Craft Robo. One of the first projects I decided to embark on (after playing around with some geeky papercraft toys, of course), was how to use adhesive-backed vinyl to modify and decorate my laptop.
The initial inspiration came, once again, from Adam Somlai-Fischer, who has a black sticker covering the glowing apple in his laptop that lets light shine through in the shape of his company’s logo. I thought it was a brilliant idea to repurpose one corporate identity into another.
So my first attempt was, of course, to make an Exploratorium sticker:
There were a few problems with that, though. Mostly, it seemed unsatisfying, to lack oomph in a sense. Mostly this was due to the fact that only a thin line of light came through the outline of the big “O”, and that seemed a waste of a perfectly good light source!
Coincidentally, I also became aware of a neat software called LiveBrush, which allows the user to draw smoothly using the mouse, and with very interesting and artistically pleasing brushes. For example, this took about 20 seconds to draw:
The problem was how to turn the raster image that LiveBrush produces into a vector outline in Illustrator, which the vinyl cutter needs in order to know how to cut. After a bit of fiddling with both programs, I devised a series of tracing settings that do the job automatically quite nicely. Here are a couple of my most successful efforts:
Next step: figure out a way to streamline the process so that it can become an activity to do with the public, possibly in conjunction with the upcoming Rods and Mods event in February. The idea is for people to bring in their own computers, design a decoration in an easy and intuitive way using LiveBrush, and then cut it out of vinyl: voilà, instant laptop mod!