Experimental contraptions
My studio is filled with all sorts of mechanical and electronic experiments, usually made as examples for my students at the Design Academy Eindhoven or as presents for friends, but often also just out of curiosity and for fun.
Plantreader for WAAG Society
I was asked by WAAG Society to find a way to let people monitor air quality in an accessible way. I found that plants are very sensitive to changes in their surroundings. This device translates the plant's stress from changing air quality into sounds.
Collaboration with Cascoland, Femke Bijlsma and sound artist Dennis van Tilburg.
Pet Playground
For Jeugdland I designed this DIY kit to make a stage with frantically crawling brushes and fluff. It includes a manual, a tiny vibration motor and a clothespin to make your own battery clip. You need to add an empty cardboard box yourself. This popular toy teaches the basics of electricity (building and connecting a battery holder) and stimulates exploration (how can I change the stage for other behaviours?)
I also developed a more expensive wooden version and a miniature soccer version.
Autonomous pet robots for a school
Brand new technical school TASC asked me to develop two robots to drive around the school as high-tech pets. I built the robots on hacked Roomba bases, with electronics (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, sensors), screens and sounds added on top. The robots can be used as examples for the coding and electronics classes.
LEGO Smart home
LEGO is not just great for kids, it's also a sophisticated modular prototyping system. I enjoy the possibilties and limitations, but wanted to take it one step further. I combined LEGO with a range of sensors and motors and Arduino to explore true interactivity. I designed a Smart Home with a garagedoor that opens when a car approaches. The frontdoor opens with a magnetic key. There is a secret room, that only reveals itself with the right movement/colour combination. And when it gets dark, the fireplace and the lights switch on. The colours of the lights and all the doors can be controlled from your phone. Could this be a future LEGO set...?
Lie detector kit
This DIY kit to build your own working lie detector has always been popular with kids. It translates changes in skin conductivity (sweaty hands!) into sounds. To prevent soldering I used terminal connector blocks and later I developed a paper template for breadboards. There is also a soldered version in a wooden box for those who want to learn how to solder.
Workshops
Over the course of the past 20 years I have hosted a wide range of workshops with schoolchildren, students and refugees. As diverse as the participants and the topics are, the common factor is always creating surprising objects using relatively simple materials and techniques.
Maze Typeface
This typeface seems like an intricate maze at first. Only when you move your eyes or scroll the page can you see it is actually made of letters. Setting it to bold makes the text easily readable. You can try out the Mazing font here.
Container Origami
For the Heijplaat, an industrial harbour site in Rotterdam, I designed a folly sculpture. Cargo containers seemed a fitting material for that location, so I treated it as paper and folded an origami shape from a container.
The scale model (made from old radiators) was displayed at an NAi exhibition. After meticulous engineering calculations, the final folly was built in a shipyard and placed near container terminals. The folly is now part of the official Rotterdam sculpture collection.
Collaboration with Femke Bijlsma, Wouter Roeterink and Ron Nout.
Kinetic Art installation
One of my favorite kinetic artists is Jasper Kooper. It was wonderful to help him develop electronics, Arduino code and mechanics for his artificial grass installation. It seems simple on the outside, but each "plant" is actually a powerful processor: The leaf starts to sway in a random rhythm, then it listens to its neighbours and eventually they all synchronise. After a while it seems as if the wind blows across the dunes.