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Recently some friends from my coworking space asked me to join them in organizing a Coworking Hack Day – A weekend of bringing together new people, collaborating on fun projects and hacking a better and more beautiful work place. Of course I was in!
So save the date: Coworking Hack Day is happening on August 27/28, 2011 at co.up coworking space, Berlin.
Besides the 24 hour hacking, there will be workshops and some other surprises. We’re hoping for a diverse crowd with varied interests, whether that be crafting, lighting, art, hardware, photos, webstuff, arduino, making mate, or anything else. Already excited to see the outcome of this! Updates will be published mostly on twitter, so if you’re interested, follow.
Aug 04
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Last weekend (May 28/29) I attended Music Hack Day in Berlin, an event where programmers, artists, designers and all kinds of creative people meet and team up to hack anything related to music – web apps, instruments or as in our case, street art installations.
The Hack Day took place at the Berlin MTV HQ, nicely located at the Spree River. First I was worried about spending the beautiful sunny weekend inside hacking, but the amount of good people, the creative energy and the exceptionally well organized event (thanks Roel and Johan!), were well worth it. We even got a surprise midnight cupcake delivery, and a mascot pug! Within little more than 24 hours, almost 50 projects had been created. Among my favourites was Eigendrums, a hack that turns your body into a drum machine. You can trigger drum samples by clapping, hitting on your chest. etc. I also really liked sleev.in, a tool to quickly share your favourite album of the moment with a little personal note, like insta.gram for music. You should check out the complete list of hacks here.
The project i was involved with was Music Haekel Day. A couple of days before the event, Claudine and me decided we wanted to craft something out of old audio tapes, transforming the material into something new while preserving the sounds recorded on it. So we brought a bag of dusty tapes and some crochet hooks to the venue and were soon joined by Alex, Alex, Joel, Jeff and Guido. The better half of Saturday we spent teaching each other how to crochet and discussed what the project actually is about. In the end we created little installations out of the crocheted tape all over the building and at several spots in the city. Each installation got a QR code attached to it, which could be scanned with a smartphone. It then opened a Soundcloud page with a snippet of the sounds that were once on the tape. You can also see and listen to the project on a website we hacked together last minute: musichaekelday.org.
I left the event heavily inspired and amazed by the creative output and communication. Some take aways are…
- Berlin is bursting with talented and motivated people forming a buzzing tech scene right now. The EuRuKo/EuRuCamp after party later that weekend was also proof for that.
- Getting out of your usual field of practice and creating something fun with people from other disciplines helps you staying creative and motivated. Also, teaching each other stuff is important. Little is more rewarding than introducing fellow designers to Git. Or Crocheting.
- Happy and relaxed organizers make a happy crowd and an overall awesome event.
- More tech events should be about actually making stuff, not only talking and presenting. So that’s something we are currently discussing for our up.front events. More about that soon.
