Recycle for LightUpPoUptober

Last month I was invited to take part in a fun celebration of pop-up and light-up tinkering led by the team at Chibitronics, inspired by a larger project by greeting card maker Keith Allen. For each day of October, a different tinkerer got assigned a specific theme for the project.

I had the challenge of making the RECYCLE themed light-up & pop-up project and I decided to try to make my creation out of as many recycled materials as possible. I used a discarded amazon envelope for the base, old scraps of wire for the connection and cut out letters from old boxes for the decoration! It was really fun to see how many old materials that I could reuse!

As a subject for the card, I chose a recycling truck both because it fit with the theme and due to my two-year-old’s obsession with all garbage/construction equipment it was easy to find a model for the design.

I decideded to add in a solar garden lamp that I had previously explored on a couple projects with ETH University in Zurich and the Exploratorium Tinkering Studio to design new museum experiences. This component is really fun to play with because it is both the sustainable power for the project as well as a switch that turns on the light when it’s dark (or covered).

Some of the ideas from this prototype could be reused in future iterations of the glow city project (one of the playful explorations in my new book The Tinkering Workshop). I’m looking forward to more experimentation with this idea.

Check out all of the other #lightuppoptober submissions on the Chibitronics instagram page. Some of my favorites were SPLIT by Jie Qi, CHAIN by Hello Play Collective and GUARD by Jasmine Florentine. These and many others open up new possibilities for playing with LEDs, conductive tape and paper engineering!