What It Is
During the course of the Masters, I had been working on a research and experimentation of a methodology aimed towards the inclusion of diverse communities within contexts of MakerSpaces or Fablabs. I worked along with the Future Learning Unit to develop workshops that aided in the experimentation of my research. The workshops were structured around the teaching 2D design to create stamps and stencils for the upcycling and personalization of second-hand clothing. The reason for this specific structure was the collaboration initiated with an organization in Barcelona, Open Cultural Center, who were aiming to hold a vintage market.
In the end, the project was a methodology on the collaboration between diverse communities and makerspaces, called Ta'awon. You can learn more about the project on its website found here.
Topics Incoporated
Week 2
Week 2 - Project Management. In this week we designed and set up our FabAcademy websites. The template given to use was based on Markdown and Jekyll and I had been more comfortable with html and more interested learning it and so I switched it to html. During that process I encountered a large number of problems and struggles with the local folder, repo, and ssh keys where I accidentally wrote my FabAcademy page on top of my MDEF site; which took many hours to fix (with and only with the help of Oscar Gonzalez). Later on when the two sites were separated and sending to the correct repo, I had many issues with committing large files and having to rebase.
All those struggles have helped me set up my poject website, not perfectly, but easily. I downloaded a template off of Themefisher and began to edit it to the brand identity of my project. During that process I faced no challenges, but I did discover how to use the 'collapse' function successfully which felt like a great achievment. Once the website was ready to be published I began to follow the original steps of ssh key generation and linking the local to remote. This is where I faced the struggles, a million of them. Unfortunately, with the stress of finalizing the project for submission I was not able to document the step-by-step process. Below are the results of the steps taken:
I generated a new public ssh key in the same folder as my MDEF repo ssh key with a title.
Then to be able to push the different repos I needed to configure when to use which key to push to its corresponding repo. This part was the most terrifying part as if I did not link them properly I would have repeated the problem I faced with setting up the FabAcademy website. Luckily, I configured them correctly.
When I came to add the ssh key to configure the step above I faced an error message that said, 'Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the repository exists.' To solve that, I had to 'eval ssh-agent'. Which also didn't work and I the reason was that on Windows it would work better if you type it in as 'eval $(ssh-agent)' and then 'ssh-add'.
Week 3
Week 3 - Computer-Aided Design. This week was used for the workshops that I and Tommaso Salini held in the FabLab BCN space and the designs can be seen in that week's page. As we had decided that the workshops revolved around stamps and stencils, we needed to cut some examples to show the participants to get a clearer idea on what they would be doing. I cut some vinyl stickers with the logo of the organization that the participants are from as a giveaway for after the workshops.
Week 4
Week 4 - Computer Controlled Cutting. For the creation of the stamps workshop, we cut some patterns, letters, and numbers that the participants can begin to experiment stamping with to create their own designs. We used the laser-cutting machine and plywood.
Final Thoughts
I would have really liked to create a longer workshop series where we could use the laser cutter and vinyl cutter with the participants and then move towards creating inputs and outputs. It would have been great for their vintage market if we could have coded lights to blink to the tone of the music that would be playing within the market.