HACK YOUR OWN BOOK

There's more than one way to write a book.

Electronic Popables is from MIT's Hi-Low Tech group at the Media Lab. Here's what its creators have to say about their electrotactile creation:

"Electronic Popables is an interactive pop-up book that sparkles, sings, and moves. The book integrates traditional pop-up mechanisms with thin, flexible, paper-based electronics and the result is a book that looks and functions much like an ordinary pop-up with the added element of dynamic interactivity. Electronic Popables was built by Jie Qi, with assistance from Leah Buechley and Tshen Chew."

 

The Hi-Low Tech group sounds like an interesting place to explore boundless creativity.

"[the] group integrates high and low technological materials, processes, and cultures. Our primary aim is to engage diverse audiences in designing and building their own technologies by situating computation in new cultural and material contexts, and by developing tools that democratize engineering. We believe that the future of technology will be largely determined by end-users who will design, build, and hack their own devices, and our goal is to inspire, shape, support, and study these communities. To this end, we explore the intersection of computation, physical materials, manufacturing processes, traditional crafts, and design."

I like the idea of democratizing engineering.