By Hello Play! For Chibitronics
Andrea, Mariana, and Celeste (the Hello Play! Collective) are always looking for ways to virtually collaborate and make together. For this project, we took inspiration from a fun approach to designing paper circuits called “Exquisite Circuits” which is “a novel collaborative circuit design approach that remixes the surrealist Exquisite Corpse drawing game for paper circuits”. You can read more about Exquisite Circuits here. Check out our Instagram page to see more photos and videos from this project.
If you’re not familiar with “Exquisite Corpse”, it’s a creative process where one person kicks off a creative work like a drawing or story, and then passes it off to another person. That person adds to the work and then passes it on to someone else. At the end of this process you can end up with some delightful and quirky drawings and stories! This is the process that the Hello Play! collective tried out. Because we’re all located in different parts of the world, we used Canva to work collaboratively on our circuit designs.
Our collaborative process:
We spent about 30 minutes total designing our circuits together in Canva using the whiteboard feature. We each started with a blank space to work in (pictured below). We chose to use the Chibi Chip as a starting point for our circuits and gave ourselves a few Chibitronics LED sticker choices to use in our designs.
Next, we went through three rounds of circuit design. We gave ourselves a time limit of 5 minute per round. In round one (example in the first image below), we each added a circuit connected to the Chibi Chip. In the next round, we passed our designs to the next person and added to the design they started (example in the second image below). Then, we passed our designs off one last time, finishing the circuit design (example in the third image below).
After our designs were complete, we each selected a circuit design to fabricate. We printed our circuits out and used them as a template to create our final projects.
We all decided that we wanted to emphasize the design of the traces in our projects, and added minimal decorations to help those fun designs shine! After finishing our decorations, the final step was to program the Chibi Chip using the MakeCode editor to add some animation to the Chibitronics LED lights. We kept our programs pretty simple for this project, code doesn’t have to be complicated to create a big impact.
Reflections
In general, we loved the ability to collaborate on circuit designs virtually and can’t wait to try this process again! We found that because our designs were a little complicated, it took some time to tape down the traces, so this project might not be the best for someone who is brand new to working with conductive tape. Hello Play! Collective member Andrea reflected that one way to make this process a little simpler might be to create some design constraints. Instead of drawing lots of complicated designs as we did, consider giving each person some limitations like, “each person adds one swirl, and two straight lines”.
Materials
If you would like to try this out, here are the basic materials you’ll need: