Awesome Foundation - Projects

Boston, MA (Inactive) – Ripley Garden for the Hungry

2010-08-24T00:00:00Z

I grew up on a farm in South Dakota. I was in the Armed Forces in the early 70's. I am near retirement from the construction field. I grow a 2000 sq.ft. garden and give fresh vegetables to the elderly in the neighborhood. I have this one acre grassfield I want to turn under and expand the grow area go 20,000 sq.ft. I would be able to supply the local missions with fresh vegetables and fruit. If I can feed a few, I can feed many more.

San Francisco, CA – Sounding the Waters (Sea Change)

2010-07-20T00:00:00Z

UPDATE MAY 2012: "RISE: Climate Change and Coastal Communities." This series of radio documentaries, multimedia webstories and audio tours explores the impact of sea level rise and extreme weather on the lives and livelihoods of people living along the shores of the San Francisco Bay. RISE is great storytelling about real people and a particular place. This local story about a global issue allows listeners to make a connection to their own lives and the challenges we all share. ++++++++++++++++++ from the original submission: SOUNDING THE WATERS is an audio tour -- free and downloadable from the internet -- for people riding the San Francisco Bay ferryboats. This tour will take listeners on a journey of the San Francisco Bay: underneath the surface to swim with the harbor seals and phytoplankton, overhead to soar with a million migratory birds, and along the coast to explore marshlands and skyscrapers that ring the Bay. Along the way, we learn how sea level rise, due to climate change, will affect the contours of the Bay and the human and natural life that depends on it. Finally, we learn what steps people are taking to address this paradigm shift. SOUNDING THE WATERS weaves stories of the men and women who have made the Bay Area their home.

New York City, NY – Hip-Hop Word Count

2010-07-15T00:00:00Z

The Hip-Hop Word Count is a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 Hip-Hop songs from 1979 to present day; the database is the heart of a web based analysis tool that generates textual and quantified reports on searched phrases, syntax, memes and socio-political ideas. The idea to build the Hip-Hop Word Count came out of having hundreds of passionate discussions on the topic of Hip-Hop as a music form: Which was the most popular champagne in Hip-Hop during 1999-2003? Who was the best rapper of all time? Which rapper had the smartest songs? Which rapper used the cleverest metaphors? Which city's rap songs use the most monosyllabic words? Does living in higher altitudes create a natural proclivity for gangster rap? Being tired of having the answers left up to conjecture or whoever had the loudest voice, I decided to build a tool that would help answer these questions and literally chart the cultural patterns observed in the wide canon of Hip-Hop music.

Ottawa – Transplant

2010-07-13T00:00:00Z

This summer, Emily Comeau (a fibre artist from Quebec) and Emily Cook (a book and paper artist from Ontario) will be collaborating to create an immense and interactive tunnel book made from local plant materials to install in a barren patch of city. The “book” will be 10 feet high and 12 feet long and contain 6 “pages” featuring a cut paper story of urbanism in archway shapes that people can walk through and interact with. The structure will be made of live willow branches and the paper pages made of flax paper infused with seeds. As the elements erode the paper, the sculpture will disintegrate and the seeded paper will sprout. This way the sculpture will have a changing life and meaning as the urban world we create with the cut paper will be eroded and changed by the living materials. Emily Comeau is a recent graduate of Concordia University, majoring in Fibre Arts and was awarded the Prix Diagonale for her artistic achievements. Her art practice is largely fibre based. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and events in Ontario and Quebec. More information about her and her art practice can be found at her website. Emily Cook holds a BFA in printmaking from Ontario College of Art and Design and an MFA from Louisiana State University. She is now practicing in Toronto . She makes paper based sculptures and books, and sometimes teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design. She has won numerous awards and shown in both the US and Canada. You can see some of her work at her website.

San Francisco, CA – Robotic Desk Lamps

2010-06-22T00:00:00Z

(http://www.rotormind.com/blog/2011/Robotic-Desklamps-at-the-Maker-Faire/) I want to build robotic desk lamps. Remember Luxo Jr. from the Pixar short? Like that, but for real. All the components are off-the-shelf available: servos, microcontrollers, full-color high power LED lights, and remote control via RF so multiple lamps can move in choreographed synchrony. The whole thing would be a platform for more cool things, like web control, open choreography software, you name it. And naturally it would be open HW/open source, yadda yadda. I hope I'm not the only one that thinks that's awesome. About me: San Franciscans may know me as a co-organizer of Dorkbot-SF, an occasional hanger-out at Noisebridge hacker space, a co-founder and major designer of the SWARM spherical robots project,and instigator of other things like Chassis the Beer-Serving Robot. Though I try not to brag, I also have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and 34 US patents. In short, I am bad-ass enough to actually do this (and a record of finishing things I start) but naturally it will take time and effort and parts. An Awesome Foundation grant would help give me a delightful excuse to get started and get cracking.

London (Inactive) – The Big Dipper project

2010-05-23T00:00:00Z

Through my projects, I try to raise debates, unanswered questions, on human behavior and its surroundings with a focus on illusions. Playing with psychological and/or visual perception is something I find very interesting and important. As you know, living in big cities such as London has many advantages, but it is unfortunately difficult to see a clear sky. The city lights, the British weather and the pollution hide the contemplation of this poetic open space. Laying down on the grass and observing the stars at night is one of these simple thing that makes you escape from the daily reality. Contemplating this natural wonder makes you feel very small and brings up many questions about the human kind and the universe. The idea is simple: I am trying to recreate the missing stars in the London sky. HOW? Using black helium balloons with bright white leds attached to them. Each individual balloon represents a star, they are all anchored to the ground by a 100 meters thread. The process is very simple, but doing it is challenging because of factors such as the wind, the rain, the place, the moon, etc. So far, I have been able to release 15 stars in the sky. My real objective is to be able to control each individual star. If I succeed, I shall be able to create constellations (the big dipper for example), but maybe shapes, words, etc. The satisfying bit in this project is to see the citizens stopping in the street and starring at the sky.

San Francisco, CA – A History of the Sky

2010-05-18T00:00:00Z

I'm in the midst of a project I call "A History of the Sky," which is a time-lapse visualization of the sky for an entire year. I've put together a time-lapse camera rig that's currently sitting on the roof of the Exploratorium (an extremely Awesome museum in San Francisco), taking a picture of the sky every 10 seconds, around the clock. In "A History of the Sky," an entire year of atmospheric phenomena can be observed in just a few minutes: the sky over San Francisco Bay is a very dynamic place, with rich textures of fog, rain, and clouds over the course of the year. Variations in day length will cause sunrises and sunsets to cascade gradually across the display. These are patterns that we're all aware of, but this will enable the viewer to experience them on a more immediate level, and appreciate rhythms of the natural world that normally occur to slowly to observe. I also intend this to be an active piece. If a suitable long-term venue can be found, the camera will continue to collect images and integrate them on a daily basis, so the visualization will vary from day to day, and will always display the most recent 365 days. The project has been undertaken with a DIY mindset. The camera is a re-purposed old compact digital camera, controlled entirely by open-source software, and few tools I've coded myself. As I said, this is a work in progress, and has benefited from the generosity of the Exploratorium in allowing me to use their space. But so far, it's all been funded out of my own pocket. I've striven to keep costs low, but some assistance would be very helpful in developing the display component of this piece. There's more info on my project site (www.murphlab.com/hsky), including some mock-ups and sample movies that will help convey what the final piece will look like.

Boston, MA (Inactive) – Serval Project - Remote/Disaster Comm System

2010-05-18T00:00:00Z

With the help from some friends, I are working on improving the VillageTelco.org "Mesh Potato" so that it supports mobile telephony for use in disasters, remote and developing areas. The mesh potato is this cool device that can take just about any power source, a regular land-line phone handset and wifi and make a stand-alone telephone network. It is completely P2P and decentralised, and <3watts of power, so is economical to run on solar or wind power. My mission is to make it work with mobile telephones so that mobile telecomms can be deployed rapidly, cheaply and robustly into disasters (think about Haiti where the local network was toast for about a week), developing and remote areas (did you know that some places in Africa the minimum daily wage will buy you less than 10 SMS messages?) and plain old remote places where the huge cost of mobile telephone towers makes it too expensive to provide coverage, condemning the people their to continuing poverty and isolation. One of the really funky bits is that we can make these P2P phone networks work with your regular old phone number, without requiring access to the internet (email me for the special sauce on this). This means that we can also deploy it in developed places to make really cheap mobile telephone networks with no infrastructure. It's easy to do. The biggest problem is the telcos who own all the mobile phone spectrum. By making a demonstration using a different frequency band, we plan on getting some attention to this problem, while at the same time making a system that will work with android handsets. So we can help the poor and vulnerable of the world, and get a really awesome technology that we can enjoy in the west, too. How awesome is that!?

Ottawa – Art Flash Mob

2010-05-11T00:00:00Z

Project Y is a group of young and passionate change-makers who aspire to make positive change and change the face of their community. There are all different types of individuals: students, social entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, scientists, and others. Many are Millennium Laureates, some are TD Scholars, and others are individuals with an unbelievable commitment and determination to make positive change. For our kick-off event, we are organizing an Art Flash Mob to show people the beauty that exists here in our city. The music, art, and culture in this city is astonishing – we want people to see it. For more details, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9RKU2aJkkE.

New York City, NY – The Iguana House at the Brooklyn Children's Museum

2010-04-07T00:00:00Z

The Brooklyn Children's Museum serves hundreds of thousands of visitors every single year, providing an opportunity for learning and play with a strong emphasis on the Natural Sciences, Culture, and Early Childhood experience. A goal for our Animal dept. this year is the construction of a new enclosure for our pair of Green iguanas (Iggy and Elizabeth), both of whom are used in exhibition programs. These animals are some of our public favorites, and in her 18 years, Elizabeth has put a smile on the faces of millions of visitors! (Awesome!). We've just come out of a large expansion, and greatly improved our Greenhouse experience - and what better place to construct an exhibit/ enclosure for these wonderful animals than there?! Our Live animal collection has been a core part of the museum experience for nearly years - giving inner-city children the chance to meet these critters up close, touch them, see them eat, learn about their diet and habitat, and open the mind to a general concept of conservation through this tactile process. Iguanas are depicted regularly on museum signage throughout the city, and it's high-time we put them on exhibit in an environment that will help them flourish - where they will continue to do the "hard work" that makes them incredible ambassadors for both their species, the animal kingdom at large, and of course, the Brooklyn Children's Museum! Both have been feature countless times in local news (both TV and print), and are utilized approx. 3-4 times per week in programming and exhibition. Truly AWESOME critters, doing AWESOME work!

Boston, MA (Inactive) – Grassroots Mapping

2010-04-07T00:00:00Z

Grassroots Mapping (grassrootsmapping.org) is a series of participatory mapping projects involving communities in cartographic dispute. This January, Jeffrey Warren of the Center for Future Civic Media worked with a series of organizations and communities to produce maps with children and adults from several communities in Lima, including the Cantagallo settlement of Shipibo on the bank of the Rimac and the Juan Pablo II community in Villa El Salvador. (Read more at http://grassrootsmapping.org/tag/lima) Seeking to invert the traditional power structure of cartography, we used helium balloons and kites to loft our own "community satellites" made with inexpensive digital cameras. The resulting images, which are owned by the residents, are georeferenced and stitched into maps which are 100x higher resolution that those offered by Google, at extremely low cost. In some cases these maps may be used to support residents' claims to land title. By creating open-source tools to include everyday people in exploring and defining their own geography, we hope to enable a diverse set of alternative agendas and practices, and to emphasize the fundamentally narrative and subjective aspects of mapping over its use as a medium of control. We're currently starting to collaborate with a group of environmental activists in West Virginia, who are protesting mountaintop mining operations. They need to be able to map the environmental damage and health hazards with aerial photographs, but can't afford planes or satellite imagery. We propose building a cheap UAV based on tools developed by the DIYDrones.com community (several of them have agreed to help us) and have recruited 2 MIT researchers with UAV control system experience. We will be using an ArduPilot Arudino-based autopilot and a $73 remote control airplane with a $50 canon digital camera. But we also need support to travel to West Virginia with the equipment and work with Jen Osha of AuroraLights.org and other local activists to perform the flights and make sure they know how to continue flying. Going even further, we're collaborating with Nadya Peek of the Center for Bits and Atoms to develop a simple plane design to be built by activists and hobbyists at even lower cost. Nadya has created simple techniques to use household materials like potato starch and vinegar, or protein shake powder and natural jute fiber to make non-toxic, biodegradable composites. The resulting fiberglass-like material is ideal for cheap and lightweight planes, and its ecological composition fits well with our agenda of high-tech but sustainable practices. This is an exciting opportunity to repurpose a military technology (UAVs) to support grassroots activism in a community in need, as well as a chance to get DIY electronics enthusiasts involved in environmental advocacy where traditional academics and researchers cannot or will not. We are already organizing workshops in different communities to teach folks how to make their own balloon-based 'satellites' and would love to be able to teach people to make DIY-UAVs as well. http://grassrootsmapping.org/ http://wiki.grassrootsmapping.org/show/GrassrootsMappingCoalRiver

New York City, NY – The Anywhere Organ

2010-03-09T00:00:00Z

Pipe organs are incredible, awesome instruments. One incredible aspect that contributes to their awesomeness is their ability to play a space. Each space an organ resides in reacts differently, creating different tones, and essentially allowing room for an infinite variety of instruments. Unfortunately nearly every pipe organ in existence is bolted irrevocably into a wall staring longingly at fornications all day. This is why I'm creating the Anywhere Organ. I've designed a system where each note, each pipe of a pipe organ is attached to a central air supply through a hose. The air to each organ pipe is controlled by a solenoid valve articulated through Arduino. I'm writing modules to take MIDI keyboard information and translate it to the valves. Each hose is independent making for an octopus like instrument where each separate pipe can be installed with care and consideration relative to the space. This means the instrument can be installed anywhere; a park, a fire escape, an abandoned warehouse, a secret underwater cave. The pipes can be distributed to take advantage each location's specific character and personality. It also means that anyone can participate in the project and take a turn. I'd like to get people playing with the Anywhere Organ so they can see the effect space has on music and sound, so they have a public venue to fool around with music, and to have an opportunity to collaborate with other musical artists to create new sounds with it. Churches are switching over to digital music. This means they're saving the expense of cleaning, tuning, and clearing dead pigeons out of organ pipes. It's sad to see such a cool instrument phased out for the sake of cost and convenience but it's inevitable. This also means that there are entire registers of pipes for sale on Ebay for a song. I'm slowly buying these up. I'm also reaching out to the awesome music and hacking scene in Brooklyn to begin finding collaborators who want to help create new music with the system and help me find amazing venues to install the project in. Here is a picture picture showing my conception of the system installed in a park: http://sinbox.org/whereverorgan.jpg Thank your for your time. I hope the idea of this project makes you as excited as it makes me. -M@

Boston, MA (Inactive) – DIY Bioengineered Inks

2010-03-01T00:00:00Z

I want to develop a set of bioengineered inks to be used with various pen types ranging from gel pens to fountain pens. As an intern at ginkgo bioworks and avid DIYbiologist, I have access to a number of bugs engineered with proteins that result in colour production. I want to make special cultures that can then be packaged as ink cartridges to be used with ordinary pens. This would allow artists and enthusiasts to draw with awesome engineered inks. The great thing about using bioengineering to produce the colour, is that you can engineer them in circuits so to create "conditional inks". For example, using a promoter activated by high temperature in front of the colour producing gene, we can create a colour that will only be expressed when the temperature reaches 35 degrees centigrade. Besides creating different conditional inks (temperature, presence of heavy metals, milk ...), I would like to use the money to make different viscosity inks. I want to make the ink using a mix of glycerol and culture media. This means that the ink itself is a food source for the engineered bacteria ensuring that they grow well on the paper. Because normal paper contains a certain amount of bleach, it could kill the bacteria when drawn on. Should that be the case, me and Mac have already used coffee filter paper and seen the success. The money would also be used to develop new types of paper, making sure that it stays cheap and DIYable. I really want to develop this project as a DIYbiologist to be accessible by everyone. I think that if funded this project is a great segue way to teach people about the fundamentals at task: we are growing cells that produce a colour and we need them to grow. To summarize I would like to use the grant money to create a library of inks of different colours and also some conditional(e.g: become visible in the presence of metal or milk etc.), develop different viscosity inks to suit different pen types (gel pen, fountain pen...) and finally use this project to teach people about DIY bioengineering and allow them to make their own pens.

New York City, NY – Laser Tweezers

2010-01-23T00:00:00Z

How many projects are part lightsaber and part Magic School Bus combined into an awesome science adventure? First, I will build a laser tractor beam on board my BioBus. Then, during normal BioBus school visits, students and teachers from underfunded schools in the Bronx and across the country will perform their own experiments by poking, prodding, and perturbing cells using the tractor beam. I will document and publish the construction process in an open-source science education journal, allowing schools and science nerds around the world to build tractor beams of their own. Every time someone uses the laser tractor beam to hold a bacterium still while they produce a movie of cell division, and then feeds those bacteria to a ravenous amoeba, they will have no other choice but to blurt out, "Awesome!" With extensive experience building laser tractor beams and as founder of the BioBus mobile science lab, I am the only person in the world prepared to do something this awesome. I started the Cell Motion BioBus two years ago after finishing my Ph.D. at Columbia University. While at Columbia, I built two different laser tractor beam systems (a.k.a. laser tweezers) for my research on cell move, one of which is currently used in the undergraduate physics lab. After graduating with honors and building the BioBus, over 10,000 students at 50 schools across NYC and the country have come aboard our hands-on, high-tech, microscope lab and computer classroom. I've been told the introductory video on the BioBus website, http://www.biobus.org, is pretty awesome, so you might be interested in checking that out. Do-it-yourself experiments like building an economical laser tractor beam is possible because of breakthroughs in inexpensive, powerful diode lasers (e.g. skylasers.com). Most optics can either be purchased used or donated by our collaborators at NYU and Columbia. I will publish my protocol for building a cheap laser tractor beam via the open-source PASTE project journal (http://www.wepaste.org/journal.html). Safety is a concern with lasers. To forgo any possibility of student exposure, we will completely enclose the laser beam, visualizing the laser tractor beam on flat screen monitors connected to digital cameras mounted on our microscopes. Thus, actual danger will be completely mitigated while preserving the guise of danger (think big yellow DANGER LASER RADIATION signs), adding to the 'awesomeness' surrounding the project. Budget for Laser Tractor Beam ($1000 total) 100mW red laser - $399 Laser mount & enclosure - $75 Telescoping lenses assembly - $100 Focusing lens assembly - $50 Adjusting mirrors - $175 Safety goggles - $100 Misc. hardware - $101 The BioBus has proven to be an innovative, effective, and attention getting vehicle for science education. I have been named "New Yorker of the Week" by New York One and have been recognized in regional, national, and international press for this innovative approach to bridging the "science achievement gap." A laser tractor beam will be an awe-inspiring addition to our repertoire of excitement generating yet sophisticated tools and experiments.

Boston, MA (Inactive) – Tools for Improved Social Interacting

2009-12-15T00:00:00Z

I am currently working on a series of "Tools for Improved Social Interacting", which consists of various wearable devices that use simple technologies to condition the behavior of the wearer to fit better with expected social behaviors. I will then wear the devices over an extended period of time, documenting my change in behavior over that period. One intent of this project is to explore the potential for feedback and technologies to shape how we think, feel, and act. Another is to question our social expectations, trying to better understand the function and worth of them. Are there alternatives ways of interacting that leave more space for individual expression, thought, and connection? I have finished one device, a hat that trains the wearer to smile more. ( http://www.lauren-mccarthy.com/happinesshat/) While the video on this page illustrates a more humorous take on this idea, my intent is to alter the algorithm to provide more of a periodic reminder to smile than to require constant grinning, and then wear it for a while, observing the effect it has on my daily behavior and emotional state. I have two other wearables I would like to make. The first is a shirt that requires the wearer to maintain frequent body contact with another person in order to hear the world around her. If the wearer stops touching someone for too long, all the surrounding sound fades to silence. The purpose of this device is to explore the effect touch has on conversation and interactions. Linking skin contact with sound forces the wearer to make an explicit choice between heightened isolation and heightened connection. The other device is an anti-daydreaming scarf. The scarf contains an IR proximity sensor that detects if the wearer is engaged in conversation with another person. If she is, periodic reminders to pay attention and stop daydreaming play quietly from the part of the scarf that wraps around the ears. This device investigates the use of technology to shape our thoughts. The wearer's daydreams are interrupted as her attention is returned to the conversation at hand. I am currently a grad student in the UCLA Design | Media Arts program. As a student, resources are always limited and all project expenses must come out of pocket. The Awesome Foundation grant would be used to help offset the cost of materials, production and testing these devices. Though I am not currently living in Boston, if awarded the grant, I would love to find a way to share the finished work with the Boston BetaHouse community (perhaps arranging some kind of mini-show or talk about it). This is a primarily an art project, but I think it will ask some important questions that technologists, scientists, students, and everyone should be considering as we design for the future. More information about me, including a portfolio, bio, and resume can be found at www.lauren-mccarthy.com. Thank you for taking the time to read this proposal.

Boston, MA (Inactive) – Eco-pod Armada

2009-11-15T00:00:00Z

A fleet of aquatic phytoremediation interactive mobile pods has just been launched onto the East river. Each pod was built of a remote-controlled speed boat, wooden rods, empty plastic bottles, a fishing net, hydroponic plants and some duct tape (ok, a glue gun was somewhat involved as well). The pods are intended to provide an example for a DIY water remediation device that can be easily assembled and released into the polluted waters that surround us. They employ Phytoremediation – a process that uses plants to clean up pollution in land and water. Plant roots absorb toxins and pollutants and metabolize them into nutrients. The pod operators will used remotes to navigate the pod along the water’s edge, as they travels south with the currents. The boat performed as the pod’s motor, carrying around the hydroponic plants supported by the wood-net-duct tape structure. The plants were specifically selected to perform phytoremediation in the river waters. Plants such as Arabidopsis halleri and Arabidopsis thaliana are naturally equipped with extreme metal tolerance. In fact, the feed on heavy metals found in the ground or water that they grow in. What they do is also called Rhizofiltration – when water is filtered through the root mass and the roots absorb the toxins from the water. Rhizofiltration is a long process, but the little fleet of pods can be launched repeatedly (preferably on the weekends) until it cleans the water, or better yet – gets the message across. Launching and operating the pods is a recreational public activity – anyone can build a DIY pod, and launch it in the nearest body of water.

Boston, MA (Inactive) – Cotton Candy Cannon

2009-10-15T00:00:00Z

I've been building cotton candy making devices since I was ten. After a number of failed attempts, I finally produced my first (standard-output) cotton candy machine in 2007. Since then I've been working on two new designs - the insane-output cotton candy machine and the cotton candy gun. This summer I've nearly perfected the cotton candy gun design, which extrudes a constant stream of several cotton candy fibers from everyday sugar and is hand-held. Right now it's still under development, but I've proven the concept of operation through several working prototypes. Regardless, I want to take this to the next level - I want to give my sweet-shooting blaster a higher output and a longer range. Say... the ability to coat a rotating human in a cotton candy cocoon in one-three minutes. I want to color the streams of cotton candy. Three buttons will dispense food coloring into the sugar just before it's extruded. Color mixing should be possible, giving the artist machine-gunner a full palate of tooth-decaying paint. I want to see canvases painted with an edible media, people dressed in cotton that's hard not to chew on, and smiles all around.

Boston, MA (Inactive) – The Big Hammock

2009-08-13T00:00:00Z

There is a rich cultural history of hammocks within the arts, as a woven net or fabric cloth, they are simple in gesture, form and execution. Situating a hammock within a public park can elevate the social implication of that object. The Big Hammock is intended to serve the community as a simple lounge space as well as a sculptural expression. The Big Hammock created new ways to interact with and admire the urban and historical setting, complimenting the greenway as space of public leisure. The 8’ x 33’ wide hammock was located at Parcel 19 in the Fort Point Channel Parks area, on a self supporting steel frame and hung 36” high from the ground. The new suspended common ground where the individual’s weight, size and position were in concert with other bodies on the hammock. It was a social ground. The Big Hammock was woven out of 100% recycled PET rope. The rope’s length is 2550 feet (warp) and 1728 feet (weft), with a total of 4278 feet–which makes it 5.5 times longer than the Boston Hancock Tower is tall.