Paper Connections

I was in London last week at the V & A at an event for the London Design Week and I met Bare Conductive. Bare Conductive sell conductive ink and maker-kits. It just so happenedned that I was looking for conductive ink the week before, and had already been on their website, so meeting them in the flesh (and finding lots out about their process, and how the ink works) was really interesting -I met Bibi, who was fab, and very helpful.

So what is conductive ink? Well according to Bare Conductive it is “non-toxic conductive paint aimed at individuals interested in engaging with interactive electronics and bringing surfaces to life”. The conductive ink is amazing for making beautiful illustrated circuits on flexible surfaces. It was originally developed to be used on the skin, but is perfect for painting with. You can find out a bit more about how it works on this video.

I am working on prototypes and developing ideas for the responsive paper-puppet-story-book (which I started working on in Feb 2012 and you can read about that here). The images show a little paper couple whose hearts are totally connected -literally you press the switch and they both light-up. They are actually made with a parallel circuit. This means they are connected to the same energy source and draw an equal voltage, but are also on their own circuits in parallel. A kind of symbiotic-independent relationship. Awww isn’t that just special.

More to come: I will be making stuff at a “scratch-play-day” with RustySquid later this month, and then also a storytelling-hack-space at the end of the month. Will keep the progress up-dates here.