Embedded - 394: Being Four-Year-Olds

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Professor HyunJoo Oh of GeorgiaTech spoke to us about paper machines, paper mechanical movements, paper sensors, paper tiny Jansen Strandbeests, and paper art. HyunJoo is a professor at GeorgiaTech. She is the director of the CoDe Craft group. Some of the projects we spoke about can be found on the CoDe Craft Projects page.  PaperMech.net has demonstrations of different mechanical movements as well as FoldMecha which shows you what cardboard you need to cut out to make your own mechanical movement, including making a cardboard walker using Jansen mechanism (Theo Jansen (wikipedia) made the Strandbeest). HyunJoo recommends two books for exploring further: The 507 Mechanical Movements book as a way to explore more mechanical movements Paper Automata: Four Working Models to Cut Out and Glue Together by Rob Ives  With Unblackboxing Computers, HyunJoo is exploring sensors that can be made with copper tape on paper. The introduction video: https://vimeo.com/637626404/f670dff03e 

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alicia White alongside Christopher White. You may have heard about my origami obsession. So when I heard about a professor doing paper machines, imagine what I imagined. I am so pleased to have Professor Hyun Joo from Georgia Tech here to talk to us. Hi Hyun Joo. Hello.

Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at a paper craft conference? Do they have those? Yes, of course they do. Okay. Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Hyunjoo. I'm a designer, engineer, and or maker. And I'm also an assistant professor working at Georgia Tech and leading CodeCraft

research group. My group works on developing computational design tools and methods that support integrating computing with everyday craft materials, including, of course, paper. Does that sound enough? Yes. I could go on and on, but let's stop here. Well, we have more to talk about um but before we do that we want to do lightning round where we ask you short questions and we're hoping for short answers and if we're behaving ourselves we won't ask how and why are you sure

are you ready yep i'm ready What is your favorite kind of paper? Oh, coffee paper. Really? Yep. Cheap one. The cheaper, the better. And everybody has it. Yep.

Do you have a favorite small motor? I have that like everywhere, but I don't know where those are really from. I would just say, you know, same thing, the cheaper the better. Do you like to complete one project or start a dozen? Start one project and complete one project or start a dozen oh um start one project and complete one project absolutely if you wrote a book what would it be about designing for curiosity oh that's a great title that's actually a title of a course i'm teaching at georgia tech uh do you have a favorite mechanical mechanism i guess that's redundant do you have a favorite title of a course I'm teaching at Georgia Tech.

Do you have a favorite mechanical mechanism? I guess that's redundant. Do you have a favorite mechanism? Should I pick just one? You can pick as many as you like. I guess I have an objection to all sorts of mechanical movements. Like my favorite one would be rack and pinion. Yeah.

Do you have a favorite paper craft sensor? You know, because it's related to my field of study, I guess the question can be really unfolded in multiple dimensions. I would say as long as I can read all sorts of, you know, behaviors with paper, I just love them all. Well, I mean, to be fair, I asked you the question partially because you have this fantastic new project out where you talk about how to build an analog flex sensor, an analog potentiometer, a digital contact, a capacitive touch, and analog pressure. And I was just like, you can do all of that with copper tape and paper?

Yeah. You don't have a favorite one of those? If I pick just one out of those band sensor made of inkjet printer with silver ink that we can just print out on photo

paper and then we can transfer what's printed on paper using tape and then complete that with circuitry to transfer what's printed on paper using tape. And then, you know, they complete that with circuitry to read any form of, you know, deformation, including bending. Okay.

So there were so many things in there. Lightning round is over. I know, I know. Yeah, it was obviously. Okay. So silver ink in inkjet printers? Yes, silver nanoparticle ink. Yes, we can use any sort of inkjet printer,

but instead of putting color ink, we can kind of put those silver nanoparticle ink. It's not what my group invented. This is one of the techniques used in DIY and HCI community.

Yeah, it kind of used the commodity tool like in Zeppelin, but we kind of uses the commodity tool, like in Zipfreener, that we kind of add silver ink. Are there cartridges of silver ink, or do I have to do something? Probably cheaper than normal ink. I'm kidding.

Yeah, to be fair, silver ink is not really cheap, I should say. It's silver um but um let's say i guess one bottle of that was about like a 150 ish dollar at least in our experiment recently um yeah so it's absolutely more expensive than um the the basic color you know. But yeah, it's in the market. And it works in the inkjet printers. It does. It works with just any inkjet printer. I mean, I have conductive pens,

so that part's not that incredible to me. It's the inkjet printer part because they used to be so fussy. Okay, I'm showing my age here. But I remember when, gosh, I remember when inkjets, you couldn't put anything in them that didn't belong

or they just destroyed themselves. I think that's still true. Yep, that's still true. And now here, I guess, when I picked the, you know, band sensor specifically, I mentioned, you know, transferring it using tape, right? So now we can, once we kind of transfer the printed traces, the conductive traces, we can kind of place it on top of a variety of objects or materials, right? That means we can kind of start embedding circuitry onto those kind of, you know, everyday

objects. So that's kind of the context we wanted to kind of explore when we looked into using the inkjet printer with the silver ink technique with tape and yeah bending sensor is one of those and so i am just printing onto normal copy paper and then the tape how does that and then i tape onto the copy paper? How does the tape come into it? Oh, let me clarify. So it requires some, you know, once we kind of print out circuitry, it needs some sintering process to avoid to kind of, how can I say that? To shorten the path, we can use photo paper, you know, a bit like glossy ones that has a little bit of like a sticky texture on top of that.

So we need to use photo paper, first of all, instead of copy paper. Copy paper, okay. And then we can use any tape. In our experiment, we used 3M tapes. Under 3M tape, there are a variety of tapes that we can use. Some of the tapes are water-soluble. Some of the tapes are heat-resistive tapes, right? And anyway, using those tapes, we can transfer what's printed on those photo paper to the tape and then move it to somewhere else. This is a pretty specialized process. Can I also do this with copper tape myself or do I need to have an inkjet

that I'm willing to put silver ink in? Actually, you know, copper tape, if we have copper tape, we can just, you know, use the tape to any sort of basis, any other materials. So I guess that's cool as it is. When I talk about, I guess, the transferring technique specifically, I imagine contexts like, you know, making a circuitry a bit more complex shape or on top of a bit transparent you know surface such as window yeah so those are kind of the contexts where we want to you know apply those tape-based methods okay um so let's just skip to my project and what i want from these we haven't even we haven't even

established what we're talking about. Haven't we? No, no, we got stuck in lightning round and sensors. I think we started several levels deep in the stack. No, no, we're heading this direction. Okay, it's your show. Okay. Are you guys together in there?

Oh, yes, we are together. Okay. Are you guys together in there? Oh, yes, we are together. Okay. So I do origami, and there's a special kind of origami from Tomoko Fuse's book, Spirals. And they're coils, and they're remarkably like paper springs. They're very fun to play with. If I leave them around the house christopher just picks them up and then can't do anything else um and when chris and i judged the 2021 maker music festival we got to thinking about something with these coils that you could mash them down

and then you'd get a tone and intensity depending on how far it was depressed and i can make different coils uh that would have different tones in sizes and colors and even springiness because I can control that with the paper. So how can I make my music thing? Are you asking me? Yeah, I mean, okay, so the paper ends up being kind of helical. Like when it's flat, I can put copper tape on it. Maybe I can print something or use a plotter to use conductive ink in a pen. And I can print out one of the sensors that you you have described but I don't quite know I suppose I know I can fold one and then unfold one and then draw where things are but how do I decide which sensor to use to build things oh see I was going somewhere it wasn't

a totally random question I was headed somewhere I can wasn't a totally random question. I was headed somewhere. I can imagine a variety of, you know, really fun interactions out of what you described. Let's imagine how this is called, you know, the musical instrument that we kind of compress and release to make the melody out of that accordion? Yeah, very accordion-like paper. Yeah, something like that. So in that case, you know, by doing that action, we just need to read the deformation level and the overall the action right so um all the possibilities you described applying conductive pen or tape um we can you know um read those you know actions by looking at the deformation level um because all of those you know conductive materials in other words those are electrically

resistive materials so that we can read all those deformation level out of them right so I can imagine that kind of musical instrument and also the other side of that, if you want to think about it more, kind of distinctive kind of melody out of all of those paper sculpture, I guess. There are many projects, really cool project making a lot of kind of what's that like a piano kind of you know instrument people print them out on the wall or you know make it as a giant installation and we can draw all of those instruments at the same time those drawing function just like piano right or violin i suppose in this case you know we are kind of reading where we are pressing it right so each of those kind of work just like a pressure or push button um and at the same time we kind of need to then think about uh output then yeah that's that's kind of the different side of the question, I guess. That is a harder

side of the question to me, because the output side? I think that is the easy side. That's just software. Well, I mean, you probably put it into an analog input. Yeah, yeah. Because even the ones that are push button may not be over the threshold. So all of these

end up working kind of like potentiometers or capacitors or variable capacitors? Yeah. Any of those. What do you, yeah, most of the sensors you're reading one of those properties, right? Well, in this page I have up that nobody else can see. IUNJU has this different organization of different sensors,

so that if you want to make a capacitive touch sensor, it's square, and you touch in the center of the square. Oh, okay. But if you want to make an analog pressure one, you have copper tape that zigzags with another piece of copper tape. And that does a pressure in the direction you are perpendicular to the plane of the zigzags of the tape. Okay.

And so that lets you detect pressure. And then she's got one up here that's about the analog flex, but I'm not going to describe it because it's a very visual thing. And I've been told that that isn't appropriate for a podcast. You have these, these five sensors that I mentioned earlier. And are these, are these the only ones I can make out of paper? How do you make, I mean, is it just you put it on paper and it works? Yeah, I suppose.

But let me really start from a higher level. What? You want to start from the beginning? Yes, please. What I'm saying is that the whole techniques that we have used to make each of those sensors, I wouldn't really claim we, like my team, invented all of those. It's really really existing technique. And we, our focus was really making it more accessible and available specifically for the context of, you know, craft-based learning context for middle school use in that project. So what we did was, you know, looking at what's available techniques already in the field and see how we can

make those more, you know, understandable form and how we can make a kit of those kind of paper cards templates with craft friendlyfriendly you know conductive and non-conductive materials and parts to support educators for inclusive you know CS you know education so using the kit students can make their own sensors and then adapt those sensors into their creative project, whatever they want to work on. Does it make sense? Yes, of course. I mean, I kind of knew you didn't invent the sensors, but you're applying them in such an interesting way that makes it feel like I can understand this sensor in a way that I've never been able

to understand it when I just buy something. Thank you. I mean, I guess the transparency was the key and we wanted to really start from, you know, even if the process would mean, you know, lowering the performance, of course, because it's not really, you know even if the process would mean you know lowering the performance of course because it's not really you know optimized form maybe starting from the lower level we can you know encourage students see what's going on inside of the part so that they can kind of tinker with those kind of underlying phenomena and then make a design decision by making their own, let's say, form factors to make perhaps a circle or a star shape, like a push button, and then adapt it into their project.

I guess that was the key because we wanted to show really what's going on inside of it. I guess that's the key. And then looking at how this process, starting from lower level, can invite them to be more creative and be more authentic, have more, you know, ownership, sense of ownership in their projects. And this isn't the first set of tools like this. You've done another set.

Yeah. I have worked on this sort of project almost a decade. But really, this project, the direct motivation was from a project called Paper Mac, which I started as a PhD student a long time ago. And working on the project, all those what we talked about before you know the paper-based mechanical you know sculptures i loved what students made out of you know um the working you know the working kinetic creatures they make. And then on the process, what students added to automate their movement, to program their movement, was servo motor with a microcontroller.

And then over time, I realized, in fact, students didn't understand how a motor really works. You know, although we talked about it in many workshops, it was invisible what's going on inside of the servo motor. Really, a motor itself was invisible because it's, you know, packaged, right? It's all kind of pre-assembled so um i guess from certain points um that's where you know i got bothered and then i wanted to kind of make something from lower level in other words even if it doesn't really generate enough torque and even if it doesn't really make accurate movement i want you to start from

you know showing you know electromagnetic phenomena what's going on inside of the motor and and students can you know start from there and and make something that move from lower level. It's kind of sneak peek. So following work would be actuation side of it. So far in this paper card project, we only explored sensor cards, sensors, but we are also looking at now the actuation side of it because of the reason I just mentioned. Wait a minute. The sensors came first? I actually actuation side of it because of the reason I just mentioned. Wait a minute.

The sensors came first? I actually thought that the paper mech came first. Yes. So paper mech came first. And that's where I got motivated and then started this project. But sensors are easier to teach and easier to make a kit. So that's why we started from sensor side of it to kind of initiate the overall platform, I suppose. And I have an off-the-wall question here. What's the difference between mechatronics and robotics?

I don't know. And I guess better answer is I don't care. Mechatronics sounds cooler. That's all. papermech.net. And when I click unfold Mecca, I see a bunch of different mechanisms. There's things I may want to do. I may want to open and close something. I may want to have something go up and down. I may want to flap like a bird, or I may want to rotate. And then when I click on one of those, like the up and down, it then shows me the gear, the rack and pinion and how it works. And then if I keep clicking around here, it's going to lead me to something I can print out and put on cardboard and make my own rack and pinion. And I guess the first question is, why aren't you charging for this?

It's genius. It's so cool. I have never understood these things as well as I do right now because I can really see how they work. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And why would I need to charge for that? So that project was, you know, initiated under NSF, National Science Foundation Fund.

And that the whole project supported my PhD study as well as the overall project team. So I guess we considered, you know, we've got enough, a lot, and we wanted to make something really shareable with the community. When I made those available in the web, at the beginning, I didn't think people really, you know, get to use it really. I kind of made it available in the web as really for selfish reason.

I made it for my portfolio. And then over time, because I have shared it in several conferences and media, I noticed that some people started using it and then talked about those are usable. And then that was beyond where we started at the beginning, but, and we really appreciate it and wanted to kind of make things better because we could see that, you know,

people are using it. Yeah. That's where, you know, that has continued and we keep working on it. Now the project is done and there's no more NSF fund or whatever, but because the overall project team just loves where it's going and we can see the community is growing,

we are just working on it as our lifelong hobby project, I guess. And in addition to showing me how spur gears work and planetary gears, you have a gallery of things people have done with it, little puppets and moving widgets, some of which are clearly done by kids, some of which look more professionally designed. Do you have any favorites in your gallery? I love all of those.

And you should know that those are already kind of selected list, but I love those made by kids. I love those kind of looking more incomplete, have very specific and detailed in the storyline. I love them. There's one here that's an up and down application showing the rack and pinion. And it has a, it has a groundhog, maybe a groundhog, something that looks animalish behind some grass. And it's just so cute because it's popping up and then popping down.

And it really led to me thinking, oh, what else can I do? If I can just print out all the parts and add a motor and a power supply, maybe a microcontroller so I could have it do it at different times or different timings, it really kind of made my imagination go, oh, that's an afternoon's worth of project, not a year's worth of learning. Was that part of your goal? Yes, that's exactly part of the goal. And I wanted to make them look something inspiring, but in a way they feel they can also make something like that you know people can feel oh that looks so fun but not in a way you know we we kind of admire

um someone uh in a gallery kind of context like um you know when somebody looks so high we feel like oh my god they they they're just too far from my reality. You know what I'm saying? But in this case, I wanted to make them look specifically kind of something like we can also, you know, imitate or follow or make my own version. Absolutely. This jumping T-rex i have to say the the the finish quality is perhaps a little lower but the girl talking about it is completely awesome and just watching it it work kind of like how she wanted but not entirely was pretty fun. Do you,

how often do you get to try them out with kids? I think at least once or twice a year, I work with kids. Yeah. Do you wish it was more or is that about right? Given my reality, the other side of my job, I think that's pretty much what I can handle. Do you also work with more professional designers? Yes, I do.

Tell me more, please. Well, so my group works with a broad range of designers, starting from K-12 students and educators to, you know, hobbyist makers and design students to professional designers in the field. And what we really focus on is how a set of technologies we build can support them in their creative exploration, both in expressive and technical sides. So the specific way we kind of start from is looking at what they are already familiar with, you know, somehow in an accessible context and or materials around them. So when we work with advanced designers, it means we look at the tools objects materials or even further like practices and cultures they are familiar with and then see you know what meaningful you know additions we can make

to enable them for new kinds of, you know, making activities for, you know, different kinds of learning possibilities. What are the main differences working with the kids versus working with the professional designers or what are the main similarities? Let's see well the main differences would be um i think the kinds of challenges are different um and the overall you know the scope of familiarity scope of accessibility in terms of what I mentioned, tools, objects, materials, those are different.

Let's say what I mentioned earlier in terms of using, let's say, ink supple with silver ink. Those are the kind of things I believe people in the DIY technology community already have seen that and have used it for a while. So for them, that is familiar and accessible context already. And if we use some other tools as examples, like 3D printers, laser cutters, they are familiar with those kind of tools, right? So we can kind of start from that level. But when we talk about kind of K-12, more like working with children, from their perspective, those are, you know, what they have heard of, but they haven't really experienced those tools yet. So we cannot really use them as a starting point to open up their mind.

And I guess here I'm trying to highlight the familiarity and accessibility as a key mechanism to open up their mind because um because we are looking at really you know supporting their creative exploration side um i believe without having that that familiar and accessible context it is really hard to open up their mind and it is really hard to kind of see the culture of you know can do mindset right so um yeah i guess how we can define the scope of familiarity and accessibility those are you know different depending on who we work with. And back to your questions, in terms of similarity, I think because we work with a broad range of designers, we see a lot of similarities, how they really strive to be more creative. And we look at the technologies we design to be tools eventually. So people use them to kind of navigate their journey eventually so we just want to kind of see how they want to navigate their creative journey and what are the kind of close link across you know what they make how they think you know how they learn i guess that's the key and the similarity underlying there, like a striving to be more creative, to be more expressive, add one more layer in terms of kind of the technical capacity of their kind of storytelling.

I think those are kind of common desires across all levels of designers. That's the answer to your question. That was a great answer. One of the things I liked about some of the videos was the storytelling aspect. And with professional designers, I would think that many of them come in with a thought and just want to know how to make it work. Where the students see how something works and then build a thought around the mechanism they're learning. Do you find that to be true or is that just my imagination? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So overall tendency is what you mentioned. I would say students really come with, you know, younger students come with curiosity, what they would learn, and then think about, you know, how they would adapt it into their storytelling, whereas more trained, advanced level of designers kind of come with their ideas and want to learn more of kind of new technical possibility, I suppose. But at the same time, I guess,

really inspiring materials and techniques and tools, even experienced designers can really open up their mind and step back and think about, think about, you know, broader possibilities when they encounter inspiring kind of tool sets and that's why again i'm really looking at what they are somehow familiar and accessible to in their practices because it's it kind of builds up the context people be, people's mind can be more flexible, I feel. I totally agree with you. Because even just looking at, you know, the planetary gears and thinking, thinking, oh, what could I do with this?

Or what could I do with this and origami? Can I mix them? It just makes my brain fizz. Thank you. You mentioned getting NSF grants for these. Is it for the technology? Is it for the education aspect? What are the grants for?

I guess the grant you're talking about was under the paper Mac. And that was proposed as a new medium for engineering education that was proposed by my PT advisor, Mike Einsberg and Sherry Shee. And I believe paper mech is a short word of paper mechatronics. That's kind of what we proposed in the NSF proposal as a new design medium, combining traditional paper crafting with mechanical, electrical, and computational components.

And there we talked about how such combinations can bring up, you know, such an expanded scope of creative possibilities and how those could be new creative and educational medium for engineering for the next generation. And in that context, we talked about developing a set of techniques and new tools. Yeah, and under there, the simulator that we talked about

FoldMeca came out and what we can do using, you know, once people download the PDF file and cut the parts to make their own things, you know, the website also shows a set of assembly technique PDF file and cut the parts to make their own things. You know, the website also shows a set of assembly technique.

Those also came out of that grant. And really, I don't need a motor to make any of this work, do I? I could just use a straw and turn it myself. Exactly. That's just so true. And we actually started exploring it around the end of the project period, because at the beginning, we focused on what would be the newly enabled possibilities when you put things all together. In other words, because it was kind of proposed as a new STEM learning medium, we wanted to include some of mechanical components, some of electrical components, some of computational components in the context of paper crafting. So it was intentionally added to have some programming and circuit building.

That makes sense. It's a different way to introduce people to these topics. Yeah, but your idea was, it really makes sense. And we started looking at it actually after um after three to four years of the early investigation because as we started working with public school teachers um you know teachers talked about all the the real world, how it's hard to support all those physical computing parts, motors and teaching programming with those. So we kind of looked back and started adding individual elements

so that some of our teachers can also use some of, you know, I don't know, like different kinds of craft teachers can also use our materials because, you know, really it's, we wanted to talk about in a higher level creativity, you know, creative learning possibilities for all the fields. So what you suggested totally makes sense. You said you are going to be teaching a course called Designing for Creativity? Designing for Curiosity. Designing for Curiosity. Even better. designing for curiosity even better um can you can you give us the course right now because i

kind of want to do it and and so if you could just go through all the semester or quarters worth of information right now that would be great maybe a summary um designing for curiosity is a is a class i designed after joining georgia tech um it's a class to use curiosity as a medium to practice designing interactions for people and looking at, um, how we can make people think and change actions and, um, um,

how we can also kind of look back, what changes our actions, what impacts our thinking processes, um, all those kinds of, you know, invisible aspects of thinking process, and then adapted into tangible and visible side of, you know, our project. So curiosity here is, I propose the curiosity more as a medium, literally, to

inspire students, especially design students. I have a couple of listener questions. The first, do you have any book recommendations that might detail a few of the mechanical designs and talk about

how and why they work. The classical book would be 507 Mechanical Movements. We have that one. You have that one. I love that book. It's really classic. The classic work still works, right? It works for me because i'm i see myself really visual

learner and and bottom-up approach really works better for me and looking at those very detailed you know all the variety of combinations um i kind of, you know, at the end of it, I can see more of the essence, the fundamental side of, you know, how machines work, how each component works. If I add one more, for the same reason, but completely different,

you know, seemingly different approach would be rob ivies he is in i guess uk in in designer paper artists and paper designer so he makes all variety of you know paper model paper automata, and he also has published many books. Yes. Paper automata. That's what these things are often called. Isn't it the automata word? I think so, yes.

Paper automata or paper kinetic sculpture, something like that. How did you come to this? Did you start with the research idea of, okay, we want to explore how to make design creativity and curiosity easier or more approachable, and then the materials presented themselves as oh this this would be a good set of things to try to work with or were you already interested in working with these materials and went the other way i'm from art and design background i studied art in in seoul korea like all my teenage years, I was in art school. So paper has been one of the,

you know, most comfortable kind of medium I can kind of play with during my thinking, throughout my thinking process. And as an art student, I have admired, you know, many of kind of artists, and one of them included Theo Janssen. Theo Janssen is, if you look up, kind of, what's that,

a strand beast, you can see the whole, you know know kind of giant machine walking on the beach um and the strand walker yes yes okay yes um there he is and i have admired him such a long time and i was uh also in one of his exhibitions in Korea before coming to the States. I think it was 2009 or 10. And so admiring him many years, it was there. But it didn't really occur to me. It didn't really inspire me to feel, I can also make something like that because it's just so far from my reality.

And it looks just so fantastic. But at the same time, you know, it didn't seem I can also make something like that. But then in my first summer as a PhD student, one of my PhD advisors, Mike Eisenberg, showed me a YouTube video named kinetic paper horse. Nowadays, when we search kinetic paper horse um clearly kind of um kind of representing the the janssen mechanism but it's made of paper and it looked very incomplete um it was a motor-powered version and looking at that one i guess it was 2014 And I guess it was my first time ever I felt, oh, my God, I think I can also make something like that. Although, you know, it's much more in a humble version of that. It really didn't matter for me.

I just wanted to make my own version. So I jumped into my prototyping right there, right at that afternoon and spent a whole week to make my own version and I made it. And on the process, I realized that mechanism was much harder than I expected. So it took absolutely more time than I expected. But I spent days and nights to make my own version because I was just so engaged. And throughout the experience, I was just so into kind of making things that move.

And I started understanding, you know, investigating different kind of relevant mechanical movements. And I learned so much during that week. So later on, I kind of added the motor. microcontroller step by step so that I can, you know, learn better about circuit building as well and then programming the motor as well. And I learned just so much. And then stepping back after the week in the conversation with the advisors, we were talking about how these sort of activities can be a strong means for others too, for their learning, and how this kind of whole process can invite all of us to have so much fun of all. So that's where I started making tools, making something others can also follow up and inspire them to come up with something like that in their own version. four-legged Jensen mechanism walking which is

kind of amazing. How long would it take me to build that? Just out of curiosity for the weekend. Oh, I think you can just spend one I think afternoon to make it.

But I would say four hours would absolutely, yeah. Do I need a laser cutter to cut the cardboard? No. Okay. You don't need to, yeah. Well, I mean, you cut out actual circles. I have a machine that will cut out circles for me. So that's good because I couldn't do that part,

but I am amazed to look at this little, little guy walking around made of cardboard and a couple of sticks and a couple of motors. Yeah. And nowadays there are many kind of, what is it? The desktop plotter machines, the cutting tools. So we can also use them. Yeah. Yeah, I have a Cricut.

It's very handy. That's also my favorite. I do weird origami on it. One more question from Nathan. Do you have preferred construction materials, fasteners, cutting, and gluing tools? Like eight questions. Well, yes, of course. But the construction mechanism, cardboard?

Copy paper? I always start with copy paper just because it's around us all the time. Especially used copy paper because I don't have to have guilty. You know, related notes, whenever I do workshop, either with kids or, you know, university students, I try to use recycled materials, not just because it's cheap,

but also because it can reduce their fear about failure. So any recycled, you know, discarded materials really help. So discarded cardboard, water bottles, soda bottles, paper cups, you know, copy paper, all of those. Whenever I schedule a workshop, I start kind of collecting those for the workshop. That makes sense. Chris, do you have any questions? Yes, thousands. Yeah, I'm in that boat too. If listeners are interested in playing around with this stuff uh is there a good starting point is it just go to paper mech

or um do you have other recommended kind of beginner material or learning materials that you could point people to paper mech can be one way but really making something even seemingly very trivial making something um can help okay just starting something doing something can can help um and then you know back to what i mentioned um using the materials you've you've you don't need to you know have guilty about failure right that's the great thing about it is it's a lot of with a lot of the projects that that we talk to people about it's you know electronics based and you have to get boards and learn how to communicate with software and things and motors and all the mechanical side the mechanical side is one of the things that's most intimidating to me um whenever i have a project

that involves anything mechanical i just stop because i have to either figure out you know oh okay i've got to learn to do cad okay if i learn to do cad then i've got to figure out how to 3d print these things but this this seems like something that's really approachable that okay if i have an idea for something mechanical i can at least start here and it cost me basically nothing except some time and like you said copy paper which is not not very um not very difficult to come by so it never occurred to me to to start playing around with mechanical ideas this way and i think it's really really a very very cool thing thank you. I feel a lot of just overall, you talked about, you know, mechanical stuff. Yes, because, you know, it's about whether it works or not, right?

And I think just overall how the traditional stem field works, because it seems, you know, it requires very accurate and planned approach. We feel, you know, more distance, I guess. And that's why, you know, a lot of this kind of craft-based approach try to show different ways of entry, to kind of invite them step by step. Yeah. I think that's important because there are people who come at it from the perspective of let's just try stuff. Let's try it all, push all the buttons.

And then there are people who come at it from a, okay, I believe in the scientific method and I think we should do this one step at a time. And sometimes you want skills in the other direction. So, yeah, I'm thinking that we should clear out the living room, put a couple giant cardboard boxes down, and just play. Okay. This afternoon is about being four-year-olds. Yeah.

Well, I don't really think regardless of, you know, discipline differences, because there are many disciplines associated with what we call creativity right some of those would be kind of mechanical engineering what we talk about what we are talking about in art design craft engineering even ground across all of those fields. And some of those common ground should include, you know, what we are talking about, curiosity and kind of messing up, doing it, making it, inventing. So all of those really apply to, I think, all the fields we are talking about. Well, I feel that this might be a little redundant,

but Hayunju, it's been great to talk to you. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I think I talked a lot. I think I talked a lot. Maybe just back to what we already mentioned, making something even seemingly trivial can give all of us joy in our everyday life, I'll say. So let's spend more time on making stuff.

Our guest has been Professor Hyun Joo Oh, the director of the CodeCraft group and an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School of Industrial Design and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her site is codecraft.group, where you can find out a lot more information. And don't forget the papermech.net, which I had a lot of fun playing on. So I am looking forward to seeing more about those sensors

and other new projects. Thanks, Yunju. Thank you. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Leigh Buckley for our introduction and to our Patreon listener Slack group for questions. Of course, thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And now a quote to leave you with from Theo Jansen.

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.