Culture Lab's Jamie Allen at Gateshead's Digital Thinking Conference

Culture Lab's Assistant Director, Jamie Allen, hosted ARDUINO POWER, a fun, interactive, creative and hands-on workshop at the third Thinking Digital conference, an annual event where the world's greatest thinkers and innovators gather to inspire, to entertain, and to discuss the latest ideas and technologies.

In 2009, Digital Thinking hosted the GADGET DIY class, which was a showcase of some of the wonderful new homebrew gadgets being created using an Arduino board. In 2010, they took the next step in ARDUINO POWER by giving students a chance to actually build simple Arduino-based devices.

Hosted by Jamie Allen of Culture Lab at Newcastle University & Daniel Soltis of Tinker, students learned the basics of using Arduino and then built some simple devices to show them the potential of what they can do at home or at work.

Before the event, Jamie explained; “We’ll be doing a workshop on the open source hardware platform for electronics called Arduino. This is an exciting tool because it gives the otherwise uninitiated an opportunity to play with electronics, sensors and micro-controllers. The workshop is a collaboration with London-based Tinker, who are involved in the design of Arduino.”

“There’s not much separation in my mind between the drive and intention it takes for a 13 year old to take apart an electronic toy in her parent’s kitchen, and the intention and inspiration involved in creating a work for galleries or the larger ‘cultural economy’. In both cases you are (hopefully) pushing boundaries and trying to communicate with and through the materials and people around you.” - Jamie on the link between art and technology.

Published: 15th June 2010