Craft & Design

From traditional crafts to modern crafts, we’re covering news and interesting projects to educate you and keep you inspired. Design trends and pop culture related projects are here to inspire.

Cyborg Roach-Man

Cyborg Roach-Man

Img 1834 600MAKE pal Jean interviewed Garnet Hertz (we covered his work in MAKE 02)“Aside from exhibiting a dead frog with a miniature web server embedded in it ( allowing web visitors to re-animate it’s limbs! ), this quest has more recently lead him to using a living roach atop a modified trackball to control a 3 wheeled robot, infra-red sensors providing navigation feedback to the cockroach, with the hope of creating a pseudo-intelligent system with the cockroach as CPU!” Link.

Gimpshop (Free Open-source Photoshop-like app)

Gimpshop (Free Open-source Photoshop-like app)

WilberScott writes “For those who don’t already know, the Gimp is a powerful, open source image editing application. For more info on the Gimp visit gimp.org. GIMPshop is essentially the same program with some cosmetic changes. The Gimp’s menu structure and naming conventions had been a constant source of frustration for me because I was so used to Photoshop. So, I did what any hardcore graphics geek would have done. I hacked GIMPshop together.” New version! Link.

Multi-Touch Interaction Research (video)

Multi-Touch Interaction Research (video)

Still00Amazing video of a touch screen interface – “While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.” [via] Link.

Composing music with Electroplankton…

Composing music with Electroplankton…

200Px-Nintendo Ds, ElectroplanktonThomas Wilburn has a lot of great info on making music with one of my favorite “games” for the Nintendo DS he writes – “Composing with Electroplankton, part one: I started a one-man rock band for four reasons. I find the idea of one person onstage creating a lot of great noise on the fly to be very personally appealing. It has a kind of bizarre audacity…” tons of great tips and more – [via] Link.