In this challenge I wanted to team up with Andrea, we really enjoyed working together and we both wanted to do something with processing and printing. I explained to Andrea my idea of using spirulina ink to create prints on fabrics for the final exhibition party and she found the idea quite interesting for her research as well.
We made an artefact with a physical interface that the user touches to generate a drawing on processing which is afterwards translated into coordinates to send the G-code to the pen plotter our peers from Fabacademy made. Our purpose was to find a way of making our projects more interactive with a co-creation approach.
We managed to join both of our interests since Andrea wants to create new relationships with technology and I want to use technology to create new relationships with nature. We both worked in parallel to develop the code since Andrea had more experience with processing from her last challenge and explained to me every part of the process while I set the vibration sensor and get the pen plotter machine to work. We were afterwards helped by Josep to send the coordinates to the serial and print in real-time. We both worked on making finger molds.
In this case, I have to say that it was really helpful to divide our tasks from the begging, I also found it more comfortable to work in pairs since in all the previous challenges I did we were 3 or more members. We learned a lot of the possibilities that processing offers and it was a very challenging challenge that put us out of our comfort zone surprisingly it worked as good as we expected. Also, I think that planning and discussing the idea a lot before the challenge, helped us a lot in the learning process and as well as finding a common ground to develop an artefact that we both love. Can’t wait to test it on the workshop during Mdefest and get feedback from the users.