Name: Joanna Skorupska
City: Warsaw
Makerspace: hi.codes
Day Job: Deloitte Digital
What’s your maker journey been like?
I have a professional background in digital agencies and consulting, but I’ve always wanted to be closer to technology and get my hands dirty. It all started when Kuba Borkowski, Anka Kuprian, and I launched our after hours R&D lab hi.codes, where we dive into research & development and exploit creative possibilities that emerge from the mix of technology, real life problems, possible future scenarios, and business cases. User experience and interaction design are at the heart of everything we do, while code translates the technology to useful products. Long story short, we aim to push digital solutions to the physical world and vice-versa, be that for fun, art, or business and sustainable future growth.
What does it mean to you to be a maker?
For me, being a maker is something bigger than just making, it’s about combining advantages of technology with culture of innovation and natural curiousity. All of those new technologies and open resources give me opportunity to create digital products in a way that was previously unimaginable. It’s about breaking the rules, disrupting the old way of thinking, and reaching out for new horizons. I believe that the Maker Movement has the potential to change the world in some interesting ways get us closer toward thriving and being more sustainable.
What’s your favorite thing you’ve made?
My favourite project so far is a series of tutorials I produce together with Karol Kisiel for Deloitte Digital. This is a very multidimensional project. Our prior mission is to build the awareness and educate about the Maker Movement by pointing out how accessible it is for everyone. Each episode last 60 seconds and contain 4 parts: essentials elements, electronic circuit presentation, instruction, and net result with a working prototype.
It’s is also accompanied with comprehensive step-by-step instruction and GitHub library to give people possibility to recreate what they’ve just seen. Beside designing and developing devices, it’s also very important for us to come up with creative concept how to present those ideas in a way like no one has seen it before.
You can find all of them on Vimeo.
Are there any projects you’re looking forward to?
The project that I am most looking forward for and super excited about is interdisciplinary performance played by my good friend and actor Bartosz Bielenia. This is a perfect example how two extreme fields like theatre and technology can cooperate to come up with a new level of experience. The performance itself is preluded with a series of research. I put human emotions under examination. We are trying to define them by initiate and put Bartosz into different emotional states while measuring his brain wave activity, pulse, and galvanic skin reaction.
Collecting and analyzing data from those three sources might give us the unexpected patterns that we want to use during performance. Because at the end of the day, we want to give Bartosz the possibility to interact with mise-en-scène and influence it with his emotions. This is totally unpredictable project and defining emotions through big data is something rare and challenging for me.
What type of maker would you classify yourself as?
A future maker. We are living in a very dynamic and variable world. In a few years, most of our current occupations could be automatized and replaced with robots. Being a maker gives me a priceless opportunity to learn by doing. Also, it allows me to pursue a mixture of fields like design, coding, manufacturing, and any related field (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). All of those will enhance interdisciplinary knowledge, agility of the mind, and creativity, all skills for the jobs of the future.
Any advice for people reading this?
The best way to predict the future is to make it by yourself, so try to encourages everyone to see themselves as producers, not just consumers. Foster collaborative problem-solving and share your creative work openly with others.
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