Galen Koch: [0:00:01] So, this is going. All right. So, Rob, I’ll just have you introduce yourself. Tell me who you are, where you’re coming from, and what you do.

Robert Hart: [0:00:11] Oh, okay. My name is Robert Hart. I come from Boston. Lately, come from outside of Boston – Arlington, Massachusetts. I’m going backward in life. Retired a couple of years ago from Harvard University, where I was on staff there. While I was at Harvard, I ran a maker space and had the great opportunity to watch students learn while they were making stuff. That became my passion while I was there, and it’s in some way what I want to follow the rest of my life.

GK: [0:00:49] So, are you retired from Harvard?

RH: [0:00:52] I am retired. I still have wonderful access. I have a Harvard ID that gets me into buildings. I actually have an MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] ID that gets me into buildings at MIT and have a lot of friends with labs all over the place. So, I have no lack of interesting places to go, people to work with, and even students to work with once in a while.

GK: [0:01:18] You were kind of talking a little about your Haystack history. I’m curious about that. How did you come to Haystack for the first time?

RH: [0:01:28] I mean, those things are kind of connected. The first time I think I – we’ve been vacationing in Deer Isle off and on whenever we’ve gotten the opportunity for a long time. I think I became aware of Haystack because I was up here. I wandered onto campus at some point and perhaps took a tour. I think even then, the Fab Lab was going. By that time in my life, I had come in contact with Neil Gerstenfeld at MIT, who teaches a course called “How to Make Almost Anything” and has developed this worldwide network of fab labs. That had already kind of woken me up to the idea of digital fabrication being important. When I discovered that there was a fab lab there, I remember talking to somebody from MIT who was staffing the Fab Lab or assisting in the Fab Lab over the summer and wondering what that was all about and how a lab like that was used in an arts and crafts school. Then, through Neil, I was introduced to the fact that people with knowledge in digital fabrication often were invited to come to Haystack, which sounded like a great thing. So, my first visit – my first large-scale interaction with Haystack was coming up in 2016 as a Fab Lab resident. Jonathan Doolan, at that point, was the studio tech, and by default, I think he was the Fab Lab scheduler and coordinator. I think even then, it was becoming a huge job that didn’t quite fit into the studio tech world. But Jonathan did beautifully and hosted us well. I came with two women from Iceland, Helga and Margret, who subsequently became good friends. We visited back and forth. We see them every couple of years when they come here. We’ve been to visit them once and need to go back. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, I guess.

GK: [0:03:58] No, that’s great. I’ve interviewed them for this series. So, a nice connection.

RH: [0:04:02] Okay. They are wonderful folks.

GK: [0:04:05] Yeah, definitely. So your practice – before that, you were doing digital fabrication. What’s the background?

RH: [0:04:15] The background is my – I mean, the immediate background comes from my training and identity as a physics person, as an experimental physicist. In graduate school, I studied experimental physics [and] built physics apparatus. After graduate school, I taught, I was a researcher here and there, and ended up in 2006 or so at Harvard University after having done teaching and realized that classroom teaching is exhausting and involves interacting with people a hundred percent of the time and having worked in a research lab and felt like that was not enough connected to people. I found what turned out to be a pretty good compromise at Harvard, where I worked in the lab to design curriculum and design things for students to do introductory physics courses and worked with people to implement them and help teach these things. So I was, in a sense, teaching physics, but also involved very much making stuff – fabrication of lab equipment and fabrication in kind of a personal way. Right? Not necessarily large budget, but innovative. I like to make things simply and innovative. So, having laser cutters and, eventually, 3D printers really fit in well with the way I like to make things. When I realized that I could get students directly involved with making things this way, that made the teaching make a lot more sense. I was able to do the kind of teaching that I really liked to do, which is not the traditional classroom teaching.

GK: [0:06:16] That’s great. So then, this residency program – what was the trajectory? How did you end up here this winter?

RH: [0:06:28] That’s a good question. My love in the Fab Lab – I mean, my passion, I think, and the thing that interests me the most is the part that involves programmable electronics, to make circuit boards that measure things and measure events in the world and turn them into information that gets turned into an output – another event in the world, or a color, or a sound. That captured my imagination in working with Neil’s class. When I came to Haystack, I was looking for ways to implement that in the craft world. I think the Haystack lab was looking also for ways to involve artists who were not specialists, most of whom had not had experience with electronics and might be kind of uncomfortable with coding and things like that and how to connect them with that world of programming and electronics in a user-friendly way. So, that became something that I’m really – and has been for a long time something I’m interested in is working with non-specialists to figure out how to use some of these electronic and programming tools to express what they want to express or to make something that they need to make in their life for one reason or another. I think that’s how I got here because I started talking with James about the fact that that area was kind of underdeveloped in the Haystack lab. He, I think, was interested in me coming and fiddling around and trying to find ways to get their inventory of things and electronic components updated so that more people could benefit from them and use them. I think we’ve talked for a couple of years about ways for me to do that. I’ve been involved a little bit in mentoring students at long range that he has had here. We tried last year, maybe the year before, to get me out for a workshop of some sort. That did not come through. So, I think this is a long-planned couple of weeks for me to do this kind of work on both of our parts. Certainly, something I’ve wanted to do.

GK: [0:09:30] And what’s the experience been like? What have you been kind of working on and tinkering with?

RH: [0:09:36] Well, the experience has been overwhelming and fun. I think working with Janet and our colleague Zack has been energizing. We range all over the place. I found it a little hard to concentrate on – and very delightfully hard to concentrate on what I thought I was going to come and work on. I’m having a lot of fun learning the processes that she has brought up. But I’m also getting an opportunity to work with her and to work with Phoebe and James, to some extent, in learning about some of the things that I’ve brought up to offer. It turns out that the sort of electronics that I’m talking about have become much easier to use. They’ve become smaller. You may be familiar with projects that are made using Arduino boards, with boards this big and with wires going all over the place and turning into a bird’s nest of mess, so projects hardly ever got off the breadboard stage. Now, the devices are small. They’re fairly cheap. They can be wired into much more reliable and solderable circuits. And they can be programmed very easily. I’m particularly interested in a particular programming language called MicroPython that’s related to Python, which is a language that many computer people use and many beginning computer people can use fairly easily. So, small, cheap modules that can be soldered into projects easily and communicated with in a beginner environment is what I’ve been interested in introducing and bringing up. I’ve, to some extent, been able to work with Phoebe, James, and Janet as well to learn how to use these things and to give me ideas about what might work.

GK: [0:12:06] You said you haven’t had as much time to work on the thing that you thought you were going to work on. Do you think that’s going to change, or are you resigned to –?

RH: [0:12:18] Oh, I’m delighted. I made it unrealistic, of course – an unrealistic bucket list of things that I wanted to do that was ten times longer than I had any reason to expect that I could do in the two weeks that I was here. But I think we’ve identified a few things that really are important and that I will accomplish and leave with these folks.

GK: [0:12:46] Can you share them? I’d love to hear.

RH: [0:12:48] Oh, I’m happy. Well, one is – I mean, if you start with a microcontroller board and put on a string of lights, there are simple ways to control the colors of the lights. So, you can imagine a microcontroller board with some dials that mix the colors. That’s a device that I’ve left. But Phoebe and Janet, for instance, are interested in connecting two devices over a long range using the internet. That turns out to be something that these little boards that I’m bringing can do quite easily. By the end of this week, I should have the ability to program one of these boards to send a combination of lights, the information about a combination of lights from Phoebe.

GK: [0:14:06] Excuse me for one second. I have to cough … We’ll go back to the two devices.

RH: [0:14:22] Okay, good.

GK: [0:14:34] All right.

RH: [0:14:34] Okay. So, we’ve built and documented ways for these little boards to control colorful LEDs. That’s something that’s fairly easy to do. What we haven’t quite learned to do is to have one board communicate with another board at a different place, which is done through the wireless network and from there through what’s known as a broker on the internet. So, Janet in Boston will push a button. We’ll adjust her LEDs to be a color that she likes. Push a button. Her microcontroller will send the information about that combination to the web, which will send that information to Phoebe’s similar device in Haystack, which will turn the LEDs the color that Janet chose. They’re going to be able to communicate by color through the internet. So, that’s one device that we’ll end up leaving here with documented instructions so that anyone can take the idea and give it their own twist and perhaps apply a different approach.

GK: [0:15:52] And that sounds like – is something that wasn’t really a process or part of the Fab Lab prior to you being here. Maybe if someone was interested in doing coding, it was.

RH: [0:16:06] Yeah, I think it was something that was not terribly accessible. It could have been done for years with equipment that the Fab Lab has. But we hope to get the process documented and more accessible to more people this way.

GK [0:16:27] Are you taking some things into the work that you’re doing outside of this experience? How is it influencing your practice or your work when you leave?

RH: [0:16:42] Well, one of the things I’m interested in is figuring out ways to get these tools into the hands of artists and craftspeople and other non-specialists. It’s getting me interested in that, giving me better ways to do that, and understanding – again, another understanding of how people unfamiliar with the field, like Phoebe to some extent, learn and approach these things. So, I’m really coming away with more passion for spreading this out in the arts communities.

GK: [0:17:34] And why? What’s the implication of having this in the arts community for you?

RH: [0:17:42] I. Well, for me, partly, it’s just the raw pleasure of watching people learn, watching curious people learn. I think that there is a place for these tools. I think artists are always looking for ways to tell stories and make meaning. I think devices that can take information from here and use code to turn it into other things happening there, or to respond in some way to an environment, to communicate the way that we talked about Phoebe and Janet communicating, I think these are all things that – well, in fact, everybody needs this. But I think it makes a lot of sense in the world of art. The connection with more traditional crafts is also interesting, and I think always has and will be an interest of mine. I think that I’m going to carry through, not necessarily as an ambassador to the craft world and a teacher of craftspeople, but it’s just interesting to me in the way that I make things and repair things and do things in my personal practice.

GK: [0:19:15] Yeah. Are you working –? So the students that are coming later from the school, has that been part of the process the whole time?

RH: [0:19:28] Oh, yeah.

GK: [0:19:28] Oh great. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

RH: [0:19:32] Well, we worked with them on music boxes when they came. They came last Tuesday. Janet had brought little music boxes that are played by strips of paper with holes punched in them. Our approach to this is to think of the music strips as code and the music boxes as computers and to give the students some experience in punching holes in the paper to make different sounds. They really composed music by punching holes in paper and moving the strips through the music boxes. Hoping to get them thinking about this as just sending binary codes, holes or non-holes, through a computer. We showed them that they have the option of – we showed them an electronic means of making sound and the fact that you could program one of our little devices to create a sound when you push a button and started to do things like having them record their voices and connecting voices electronically with button pushes. We will continue that on Tuesday because our colleague Zack has brought up some really nice devices that he and Janet have made. We all were working on them yesterday in the lab to play with sound, basically, electronically and programmatically.

GK: [0:21:33] Was that the thing that you were pressing to say no and yes?

RH: [0:21:36] Yes. That was the little button actuated –  Zack has installed little button switches underneath his really cleverly designed laser-cut flexures to bring forth a sound file every time they’re pressed.

GK: [0:21:57] Very cool. This is maybe a little bit of a stretch, but I’m curious if it prompts anything for you. How is it different being here right now in this winter residency versus a summer Fab Lab residency for you? What are some of the key differences?

RH: [0:22:20] Oh, it’s very different. For one thing, we don’t hear a bell and immediately get fed three times a day. Kind of miss that. We’re very much focused on what we came up to do, and I get, really, the luxury of interacting with the small group of Janet, Phoebe, James, and now Zach in a very concentrated way. I mean, yesterday, I think I worked on the same thing for about eight hours at a stretch, which is unheard of in the summer for almost anybody except maybe the instructors in the sessions. But as a Fab Lab resident in the summer, you’re doing five or six different things in parallel. When you’re done with one, you get pulled into something else. It’s fun and exhilarating, but here, we’re actually having a chance to develop things, some of which will leave here, and some of which we’ve shared will take our own separate ways.

GK: [0:23:47] Yeah, that’s great. What’s the experience just being in Deer Isle in this way?

RH: [0:23:55] Oh, it’s quiet. It’s wonderful to – it’s quiet in a way that it isn’t in the summer. I think we’re certainly – we’ve had two or three community events. I think the most telling thing is that I have a frequent buyer card at 44 North. The people that take care of the customers at 44 North know who we are now, which doesn’t happen in the summertime. We’re beginning, in some ways, to feel like we’re a part of the place in a way that we can’t when we’re on the Haystack campus and certainly can’t even as a vacationer or a summer transient in the area. It was nice. We visited the high school today and, again, felt like we had a little bit more of a handle on what’s going on in the island itself.

GK: [0:25:07] Yeah, that’s not an experience that’s readily available in the summertime.

RH: [0:25:13] No, no, not at all.

GK: [0:25:15] That’s great. What are your feelings just on the premise of the residency in general? You’re the first ones.

RH: [0:25:23] I know. What an honor.

GK: [0:25:25] Yeah.

RH: [0:25:29] Well, I think it’s a wonderful idea. I don’t quite know – I don’t have a picture for what Haystack would like the residency to become. For me, it’s just been a great way to explore some things that I think are of mutual interest, and that probably makes a lot of sense. I’m sure I’ll have – well, I have different things to share than Janet has. I’m certain that the people that are coming next will have very different things to share than we do. But I think the point is that we all get a chance to spend a couple of weeks doing things that we really love in a concentrated way, share some things, and learn some things that benefit everybody. I don’t know. It’s a great idea. I’m all for it.

GK: [0:26:49] Yeah, the exchange. Right. I think you exactly hit – it’s purposefully not a leading question, but the idea – it’s an exchange, and you’ve said that so many times, which I think is great because it means something was working.

RH: [0:27:08] You think I get it?

GK: [0:27:10] Something was working.

RH: [0:27:10] You think maybe this was okay.

GK: [0:27:13] [laughter] Yeah. Is there anything else? Any highlights or anything that’s come up talking about this that you want to share about the residents or your experience?

RH: [0:27:32] I don’t know. It was interesting. Walking in the front door of the lab, where I had never been, the first thing I caught was the aroma of the machines and the smell of the Fab Lab. It brought me right back to days in the summer in the Haystack Fab Lab. It may be just the carcinogens that the laser cutters make when they cut the plywood, but the smell brought me back to summer. That was kind of a highlight, one of many to come. But no, I think I’m too. I’m too embedded in it to have much to say about what it means and how to think about it as a whole.

GK: [0:28:29] Yeah, that’s okay. I think that’s great. Maybe we’ll have to do a follow-up.

RH: [0:28:34] Good. Let’s do.

GK: [0:28:35] Well, thanks so much. That was great.

RH: [0:28:37] Thank you.

GK: [0:28:39] Let me just turn off –