A couple of years ago, I met Simone Giertz, a young Swedish woman interested in lindy hop and making electronic gadgets. That's three things that I love in one person:
- dancing lindy hop!
- making electronic gadgets!
- being Swedish!
Chatting with Simone at a lindy hop social, I mentioned that I worked at a science museum and ran workshops for youth. Soon after, we set up a meeting to talk about possibly collaborating. Simone shared with me a couple of fun, well-produced instructional videos that she helped produce. I got a couple of neat gadgets out of the meeting. But nothing really panned out. A couple of months passed and Simone moved away.
And two years later, she's the queen of shitty robots.
Really it's a brilliant concept. There are hundreds of YouTube channels showing builders and makers showing off their "epic" achievements. Typically, they feature some talking head explaining the concept of the build, some digital schematic of what it will look like, some timelapse footage of the build, and then a big reveal of the awesome final product.
Simone puts all that on it's head. She celebrates the crappy, the wacky, and the beautiful "failures" in the design process. And she does it with style and a perfect deadpan.
I'm so impressed with what Simone has achieved, not only for herself as an amateur maker and engineer, but also how much she has inspired literally millions to go out there and tinker, create, mess up, and try again. That's an important lesson for science, engineering, and really life in general.
So if you have not subscribed yet to Simone's videos, please block of an hour or two for the YouTube hole I just cast you in to. You're welcome.