The prefect creative digital tool would be one that can be mastered with almost no instructions, as easily as a paintbrush. Enter the glowforge laser engraver. This machine takes a hand drawn design as an input and quickly cuts it out of different types of wood or plastic.
Over the past year, our glowforge laser engraver has more and more become part of our own workflow as we are prototyping new ideas. We have been using it to make ornaments and signs from drawings and even to create shapes from graphic designs scanned directly from an IPad.
Two weeks ago, we debuted the glowforge at a drop-in workshop for adults that combined tradtitional making with digital tinkering. The workshop involved laser etching as well as wire bending and making circuits. As we invited museum visitors to prototype this new idea together with us, we had to work with the challenges that come with interupting the natural flow of making by transfering designs to and from a digital tool, but we also saw the great potential of merging analogue making with a digital fab technique.
We were amazed by visitor's hand-drawn designs turned into wearable acrylic jewelry pieces that glow. We are looking forward to adding this digital tool to other computational tinkering workshops in the future.
This work was supported by a grant from Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation