I was very impressed by the work demonstrated in maker faire. It was out of my expectation! Just as Katherine said in class, this is really a place giving people a chance to explore concepts that might ahead of other sophisticated works out there. Although some of the works here could be rough and impractical comparatively, I was still excited to see all of the ideas come to live and we could play with them.

This was one of the funniest design I saw that day. There were few kids stood there to play with those racing cars so I could take a sneak peek of how this worked. Instead of using cool styles of cars or challenging tracks, this design sticks to simple interfaces. But it attracted so many kids there, which reminded me the fact that not pretty or stylish designs drive people to be part of the work but the user mental experience. The water swing was also one of my favorite that if I were 10 years old I would definitely climb on it right away! Being on the air and at the same time surrounded by water drops, imagine how fascinating it could be!

These two designs of using wheels to control music was the biggest inspiration to me that day. The whole thing was to create DJ style music by using rounded objects. The designer who made this showed us how this was originally built as well. I thought the interactive character of this design gave users the most control and also in a very modest way. This piece of work was so fun to play that I might implement the idea into another class of mine this semester.

The last piece I introduced here was so hilarious that I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw it in Maker faire. The fish attached on the car were constantly moving their tails according to the music beats played by itself. The whole scene was so creepy but full of black humor. I was really amazed by such works allowing people to think in a blue sky way. Overall, Maker faire was a really great event and gave me a better sense of what interactive design really is and should be look like.