On 12 October 2023, I facilitated an e-textile and energy harvesting workshop for high school students at Aalto University as part of the A! Shaking Up Tech event — an annual programme organised across universities in Espoo, Oulu, and Lappeenranta for young women and gender minorities beginning their path towards university studies.
The workshop introduced participants to the basics of ambient energy harvesting through hands-on making. Each student constructed their own textile keychain that lights up using piezoelectricity — learning how a diode bridge works, building the harvesting circuit on felt, and assembling everything with conductive thread. The result was a soft, squeezable creature of their own design that blinks an LED when pressed or tapped. We ran two sessions with 16 students in total, with support from Esa Vikberg and Agustin Contreras.
The variety of creatures that came out of the workshop — hearts, bears, monsters, cats — was a good reminder that giving people technical constraints and creative latitude at the same time tends to produce the most interesting results.
