Writing, teaching and publishing all become worthwhile when they enable other creative minds. I met Ari Lacenski at the most recent ITP show and she told me about her new Anti-social Lights, fashioned in part by hacking my example code. She writes, “I thought about heaping small lights in a pile and tuning them to change when collected. Then I thought, ‘What if they don’t all want to be together?‘” So just like people, some light up only when they get away from their annoying neighbors.
Meeting strangers you’ve collaborated with is just one of the fun things enabled by open hardware. You know, as long as they don’t stand too close to you…