Ink that conducts electricity; a window that turns from clear to opaque at the flip of a switch; a jelly that makes music.
All this stuff exists, and Catarina Mota says: “It’s time to play with it”.
Mota leads us on a tour of surprising and cool new materials, and suggests that the way we’ll figure out what they’re good for is to experiment, tinker and have fun.
A maker of things and open-source advocate, Catarina Mota is co-founder of Open Materials, a collaborative project dedicated to do-it-yourself experimentation with smart materials. This is a new class of materials that change in response to stimuli: conductive ink, shape-memory plastics, etc.
Her goal is to encourage the making of things; to that end, she teaches hands-on workshops on high-tech materials and simple circuitry for both young people and adults–with a side benefit of encouraging interest in science, technology and knowledge-sharing.
