Introducing the Interactive Workshop Pack

Combining the best of our kits to facilitate creative group activities for a wide range of participants

Design has always been at the heart of what we do at Bare Conductive, not only in the way we create our products but also in the way we work. We feel that the best outcomes nearly always stem from collaborative sessions. We often find that when people from multidisciplinary backgrounds come together as a team, it can be an incredibly powerful opportunity to drive innovation and creativity.

That’s why we originally developed the Touch Board Workshop Pack, as a tool for participants from different disciplines to work together as a group in a collaborative environment and learn how to harness the power of the Touch Board and Electric Paint, to propel their ideas and projects with our sensor technology.

The original Touch Board Workshop Pack was a huge success with our customers. The simplicity of having all the information laid out in a straightforward guidebook with inspirational activities and technical insights enabled them to focus on encouraging participants to push their creativity further. It successfully served its purpose of making Touch Boards and Electric Paint accessible to a vast audience. However, part of the design process is also to iterate and improve.

At Bare Conductive we regularly review our product range to ensure we are always delivering the best technology, resources and projects to our community. When the Touch Board Workshop Pack’s turn came, we reviewed it all the way from its external packaging design, to each individual part, and down to its supply chain. Through each stage we requested feedback from attendees and past customers. We carried out extensive surveys to get an in depth understanding of how our customers felt about the product, how it was being used, what they liked and disliked, and what could be expanded or improved.

Some of the results were straightforward and obvious while others surprised us. We discovered that as Bare Conductive evolved and matured, so did our customers, their needs, and the way they were using the product. So we put together all our research and insights and wrote up a brief for the Interactive Workshop Pack.

What did the new Interactive Workshop Pack have to be? A no nonsense, great value for money pack that is still an almighty piece of kit for any workshop. Most importantly, it needed to provide clear preconceived group activities to cut out prep time, and equip workshop leaders and teachers – with precious little time on their hands –a set of projects they could use out of the box. How did we achieved this? We designed three incredible projects:

The MIDI Paper Orchestra

Using Printed Instruments Sensors participants can quickly connect their Touch Boards to printed sensors, creating MIDI musical instruments. Teams can select sounds and play a tune or band together as a paper instrument orchestra. They can even take it to the next level by designing their own instruments using Electric Paint, and change the sounds using the Arduino IDE to program the Touch Board. This project is a fast and fun introduction to printed sensors.

Designing Game Controllers

This project introduces participants to making sensors using Electric Paint. For anyone who ever played ‘Simon Says’ this game will be a familiar. Participants get to design their own game controllers to use as touch interfaces, creating a game controller from paper and cardboard. Teams can get competitive and see who can get the highest score, or they can modify the game’s code to create their own variations of the game. A great project to get started with the Touch Board and Electric Paint using Arduino and Processing.

Creating Interactive Posters

Last but not least a project that lets you integrate smart sensors and talking posters to any other lesson plan or presentation topic. Participants use Printed Sensors and the Touch board to make presentations interactive using proximity sensing. This project shows you how to attach sensors, load sounds, and calibrate sensitivity using the Arduino IDE to create interactive posters.

The Interactive Workshop Pack includes all the content to run 3 different exercises. These basic projects are aided by a full color guidebook with all the information you need to get started, from explanations about what Electric Paint is, and questions on how it can be used, to the Touch Board and Printed Sensors’ technical features, step by step instructions and tips and tricks.

We’ve added over 30 new components and unique materials to this pack, including carbon dots, Electric Paint and Printed Sensors so that you’ll have all the tools you need to create the 3 basic projects. This way you can build on and tweak each activity to focus on specific learning outcomes, techniques, lesson objectives, experience levels, age groups, or themes, without having to build an activity from scratch.

With the projects outlined in the guidebook and all the tools you need already supplied in one box, one of our biggest goals with the Interactive Workshop Pack is to save workshop leaders time, so that you can focus on teaching and guiding your workshop participants. We also wanted to save you money, so we made sure unnecessary kit was removed and beneficial components and materials were added. Don’t forget the Touch Boards can be reused time and time again, and Printed Sensors and Electric Paint can be re-purchased to continue running workshops in the future.

From speaking to people who have used our products, and from our own experience running workshops and ideation sessions, we’ve come to realise that our technology is incredibly powerful when used in creative applications to generate novel ideas around the future of interactive surfaces and spaces. We know that some of the best and most innovative technological breakthroughs come to life when groups from different backgrounds and with different interests put their hands and minds together to create something amazing. The Interactive Workshop Pack is designed to provide the tools and inspiration for people to come together and engage creatively with our technology. Whether they do it for fun, learning, or for inspiration, the outcome is always a completely new outlook on technology and the possibilities it holds for human interaction with the materials and spaces around us.

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