The Power of Junk

Last week I facilitated a ‘hackathon’ with my colleagues at Tinkertank in Ludwigsburg. We had about twenty-five participants who spent three days working on developing a scrappy game with physical and digital materials. One cool aspect of the workshop was that it started on the first morning with a dissection of a piece of “junk” like a broken VR headset, printer from the 1980s, remote control truck or DVD player. The participants were encouraged to have a conversation with the materials and let the discoveries lead the process of developing something new.

I was impressed by seeing the projects develop over the three days. In my tinkering practice I’m used to leading shorter, more focused explorations but there’s something really interesting about the way that the creations evolve when groups have mutiple days to work on the same element.

Here’s a few examples of the finished games that included a scroller game with a physical printer, a combination air hockey / pinball machine, and a remote control monster that opened it’s mouth as part of a contest similar to beer-pong.

It’s always inspiring to try a new format for a tinkering workshop and to be reminded of the power of rethinking, recontextualizing and remixing existing objects to make something new. I’m looking forward to more chances to collaborate with this group of educators and designers for future workshops!