We like to host Impossible Workshops.
The idea is that everyone who participates learns to design and build something that is impossible to buy. Instead of having a workshop where we teach everyone to make a wooden birdhouse like old-fashioned shop class, you build a 12″ super hero action figure of someone you love. It comes complete with a custom box, accessories, and an origin story.
The goal is that the super hero has to look and feel like a real product that someone could find at a toy store.
Or instead of making a simple robot actuator to learn about engineering mechanics or electronics you make a wearable pair of 16′ robotic angel wings.
Of course sometimes this playful approach to making and learning can have real world consequences.
Or instead of making a simple diorama with a shoebox or glass jar, you make a dramatic scene from a crucible moment in your or a friend or family member’s life.
Each workshop starts with deadline and an eclectic collection of participants that are committed to seeing it through. Each workshop is held in a venue that has access to various sorts of maker tools from scanners and printers to drills and saws and craft paper and glue. Usually it’s a mix of high tech and low tech methods. Sometimes we don’t quite know how we’ll make the final project and the act of working together and riffing on each others ideas and approaches coalesce into a path forward and out of the wilderness.
For the Wings of Desire workshop series the pinnacle moment was when the entire crew of makers dressed up as a flock of angels and descended on the Castro neighborhood on Halloween night.
Keep an eye out for something that inspires you, makes you open your mouth and eyes wide in wonder and consider what would happen if you and your friends could make something that embodies that wonder and moves it from impossible to improbable to inevitable. That is the ultimate goal of the ImPossible workshops. To cothink and comake and codream together and have a little fun along the way.