GK: [0:00:00] Just to get audio levels, tell me what you did this morning before coming here.

JH: [0:00:07] Okay, great. We got up, we walked around the property, drove around, avoided a deer – that was pretty exciting. [laughter] Found a weird thing on the ground. That was also exciting. Ooh. Got some fun noises. That’s pretty cool on the telephone.

GK: [0:00:26] When was the last time I heard a telephone ring like that?

JH: [0:00:28] Yeah. That’s good. That’s really good.

GK: [0:00:31] Keep it in this recording for –

JH: [0:00:33] Posterity.

GK: [0:00:34] – play it for my children.

JH: [0:00:35] [laughter] Yeah, right.

GK: [0:00:37] This needs to happen. All right. Janet, we are all set to go. First, if you want to tell me who you are, your name, where you live, and what you do when you’re not here.

JH: [0:00:53] Okay, cool. I’m Janet Hollingsworth, and I work at the Possible Zone, which is in Boston. It’s a nonprofit that works with high school students, and I run a fabrication center there. So, we make things with students every day.

GK: [0:01:06] Amazing. What brought you to this residency program? How did you end up here?

JH: [0:01:13] Yeah. Well, I started at Haystack last summer as a resident of the Fab Lab and got to know this magical community and this place, and James and the folks that were running the Fab Lab here. James had an idea about connecting with community members and doing something that was a bit more oriented to Deer Isle and the folks in the population that live here year-round. So, the winter residency emerged from that. When James reached out to connect with me and with Rob about doing some work with the community, it was an immediate yes. My background has been working with communities in many different spaces over many different places and times, so this made perfect sense to be able to come up here and do an immersive residency.

GK: [0:01:58] Yeah, tell me a little bit more about how this does connect with what you do in your work.

JH: [0:02:04] Finding the interesting intersections between people, stories, making, and how to create meaning in the world around us is always going to be unique to different places and different people. Oftentimes, it’s about figuring out how to set the proverbial table so that folks are invited in the creative process and understand that this is all about exchange. We are here to share information about digital technologies, access new tools, and together figure out how we can create meaningful things in new ways. While I may not be an expert in a certain craft or discipline or of this particular community here, we can still come together with our different experiences and ideas and apply them to collective ideas, needs, local challenges – to solve creatively together. Create something that no one of us could do in isolation. So, by the very nature of it, we have to be together, and we have to be in community. That, to me, is a very important part of this work, and you can’t just learn it on a computer or alone. There’s something unexpected and really special that happens when you bring people together and create an exchange-based culture. So, the challenge is, can you do that in a short amount of time? Can you do that as an outsider? Can you do that as somebody that’s coming in from a very different place and a very different background? I think the answer is we’re here to figure that out together. We’re figuring out what that looks like. We’re figuring out how to work with the young people of Deer Isle and work with the schools, work with middle schoolers, high schoolers, and then community members of all ages can come during the open labs and during our special workshops.

GK: [0:03:46] And what’s the experience been like so far of doing that?

JH: [0:03:51] It’s been incredible. There’s something really unique about being here this time of year as well. I think there’s a very intimate nature to the winter up in a community like this. It becomes very personal very quickly to hear people’s stories, what the different challenges and needs are, and how we can think about tools in a different way. They’re really just in a toolbox for us to use to find clever answers or delightful answers or just make somebody smile, make gifts for each other. What can we do that’s really sparking joy? I think that takes time. You can’t come and do it in a single day. You can’t do those things without building a sense of getting to know one another. But I’m optimistic here. The community has been so kind and so warm. Every time we walk into a cafe or any of the places that are open, we’re immediately welcomed. And that reciprocity of, “Oh, you should come check out this thing that we’re doing,” has really started to spread. I’m really grateful that we’ve got a good chunk of time to be able to explore those relationships.

GK: [0:05:08] Is it three weeks or two weeks?

JH: [0:05:10] This is two weeks. But we’ll kind of extend it a little bit on both ends.

GK: [0:05:14] Cool. What are some of the ways that the sharing and exchange with the community folks happens? What does that look like when you’re in these spaces? You said people are coming with questions.

JH: [0:05:33] Yeah, there are so many amazing people that live here and some folks that have a sense of curiosity of, “Well, I’ve always done things with my hands. I’ve always done things with more traditional methods. But I’m kind of curious: what would it be like if I started to explore laser cutters or digital fabrication for the workflow of what I do?” And I think that our job here is to demystify that, to not make it scary, to show folks what’s under the hood, and that really these methods are just another tool. You can still have handcrafted designs at the end of the day, and you can use digital tools to make things –  faster, reproducible, and made in new ways that might give you an idea that you didn’t know how to solve before. I think especially introducing electronics this time around is – well, that can be really intimidating, hard stop. But we can help show, no, it’s also playful, it’s also really fun, and can be experimental. If you can open yourself to play and try something new in the sandbox that you’ve maybe not been in before, you never know what might happen next. Last week we worked with middle school students and showed them how to program different kinds of punch cards to make melodies with music boxes. Now, we’re really getting experimental this week where we’re going to be making sounds with electronics, with sensors, and show different ways to capture sound and tell a story. So, that’s really the premise of what we’ve been doing with the younger students these past two weeks.

GK: [0:07:11] That’s so exciting. It’ll be fun to see that.

JH: [0:07:14] Yeah.

GK: [0:07:15] Have you come working on projects of your own, too?

JH: [0:07:21] I came to learn a lot as well. [laughter] So there’s definitely a combination of things happening, but I’ve been really interested in machining and learning some different methods to go from sketching to machining, where you don’t have to get so lost in the computer design tools. How can we actually make something analog become digital in a way that doesn’t feel so laborious or requiring a six-hour workshop intensive on Adobe Illustrator or some specialized program like that? So we’re really going to be exploring what it’s like to go from craft to digital in a very direct way. Folks will be coming in and sketching and drawing by hand, and then we’ll be taking photographs of their drawings and turning them into machined stamps out of linoleum, which is really fun. So, again, the point is not that we are training people to make stamps. It’s more about demystifying a pretty intense process and showing a new workflow. This is just one way that we can pack the experience into a fairly short period of time, where you get a high reward. By the end of it, everybody will have made a thing, and that’s pretty empowering when you can do that in a two-hour workshop. Hopefully, it will send folks down exciting rabbit holes that lead to machining out of brass or making enameled jewelry or advanced processes – molding and casting – or even just to be able to say, “That wasn’t so bad.” It’s not so scary and it’s not just for other people with specialized education. You can start to see how you could use digital tools to improve things around your house, to make gifts for others, and then maybe even do more ambitious things. How can we make things that help us understand the environment and world around us in a different way? Can we explore how machines, electronics, programming, and creative technologies can help us positively impact the land and people around us?

GK: [0:09:26] So, you said you’re learning a lot, too. Is there something that’s been a highlight or something you’ve been focusing on?

JH: [0:09:33] Oh yeah. I mean, I hadn’t done a whole lot of programming before, and I’m learning how to use Micropython and program circuit boards to do all kinds of, again, mostly playful outputs in my case. I want to communicate with Haystack when I get back home to Boston. So, Phoebe and I are making little ESP32 microcontrollers that will be able to talk to one another. Basically, we want to be able to give each other a virtual hug whenever we think of each other, so push a button from my space in Boston or from Phoebe’s space here at Haystack and trigger something in each other’s environment. In this case, it’ll be a light that will turn on. In order to communicate in these playful ways, we need to program a microcontroller to do that for us, which, somehow, is far more interesting than writing an email or text.

GK: [0:10:36] Yeah. It’s sort of sweet. It has some other vibe. That’s great.

JH: [0:10:43] Yeah.

GK: [0:10:44] That’s great. Can you talk a little bit about the sharing of ideas with Phoebe, James, Rob and Zach Fredin, how that happens in the space, and what that experience is like?

JH: [0:10:58] It’s been extremely collaborative working here. I think oftentimes one of us will come up with an idea or set something out on the table, and immediately somebody else is like, “Oh, I see this potential in that. Oh, that’s like a game. Oh, what if we turned that into a strange soundboard and manipulated student voices and do weird experiments to make our own musical instruments?” Immediately, one person has a skill set that can help get us halfway there, and then somebody else has a skill set that’ll keep the path meandering, and suddenly, we make something interesting together. But I don’t think it takes the form of us having a very strong sense of ‘these are the plans that we’re going to follow’, and ‘this is what we’re going to execute by the end of the day’. It’s much more meandering in the best of ways because it allows us to explore new things and be open to play and experiment and delight. When something breaks, sometimes that takes you in a new direction, or you’re really determined to figure out how to fix it. All of those things have happened, [laughter] so it’s been really, really fun.

GK: [0:12:11] That’s great. Are you bringing things away from this experience for your own work?

JH: [0:12:19] Yeah. I think one of the most important things is just how vital it is to have space to play. I don’t know that we always make that. I think that sometimes, in everybody’s lives and in our professional settings, we can get really distracted by the work we need to do. It can take away from our own learning where we’re really just – I don’t know. We can get so caught up in our workflows but we need to make space to be able to turn all other systems off and say, “No, I’m going to learn new things here because that’s going to grow me, and then I’m going to be able to spread that in my community.” That’s something that you can’t plan for. But you can make space for it. I think you can add the right ingredients, you can add people, you can add some material to it, some kind of a design challenge, but if you over-constrain what you’re doing, it might take away some of the magic that comes from it. So, that’s what I’ll be taking back, is to trust each other, make space to play, and always continue to learn. We don’t just end up with answers and then go into our professional careers, and then that’s the end of the story. I think if we don’t behave as continuous learners, then we don’t know what it means to be a student. It can disconnect us from the audiences that we work with. So, I feel very connected, and I’ve really filled my cup here in so many ways, and I can’t wait to bring that back. I think it will be in tangible ways, but it’ll also be in some other much less tangible capacities that you really just have to trust and create space and not worry so much about having all the answers at the beginning. I want to keep bringing community together and lifting more voices. Creating space for that type of exchange is critical. We need to be doing that across all the platforms and disciplines that we work in.

GK: [0:14:27] Yeah, because with the Possible Zone, you’re doing workshops and things like that.

JH: [0:14:33] Yeah.

GK: [0:14:34] Part of the mission?

JH: [0:14:35] It is. It’s really about recognizing that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. So, we work with underrecognized students and communities to provide students access to digital fabrication and high-end tools and technologies. Students are really exploring entrepreneurial spirit and maker mindsets in all of these things to figure out, “Well, what lights me up? What am I passionate about? And what do I want to do in the world that will make a meaningful difference?” So, we prototype a lot. We fabricate all the time. We’re always bringing funny ideas to life, and it’s wonderful. It’s very, very joyful to be able to do that with students that have perhaps never experienced the joy of fabricating something on a laser cutter and seeing their piece come to life, like, “Oh, that was just in my head. And now suddenly, I’ve made a garment, or I’ve made something with – I don’t know – a circuit board and learned how to solder.”  And just as important is “Oh, I broke that.”  That’s great, too. These are all part of learning. To be able to unlock that curiosity is what it’s all about because that will take you into whatever self-driven path is next. So, a lot of that work feels very related to being here. It’s great to be a student.

GK: [0:15:55] Yeah. Can you describe the ways in which this experience is different than maybe the summer Fab Lab experience?

JH: [0:16:05] Yeah, [laughter] it is. It’s very different. It allowed me a chance to really grow some new skill sets. I think that that is something where, in the summer, there is a vibrancy to life at Haystack that is truly in community all the time. And as a Fab Lab resident over the summer, you’re really working with people quite constantly to help others figure out how to bring their ideas to life, again, using digital facilities and different kinds of tools and technologies, which is so much fun. But I would say that the cornerstone to that is really creative problem-solving with others. The cornerstone of the experience that’s happened over the last couple of weeks here is about how can my learning better inform my practice?.  Both the summer and the winter are about community, but it’s different. Right now it’s a much more intimate environment, and things kind of happen a little bit more measured instead of all the things all at once all the time, which is part of the summer magic of Haystack, but I think can also be overwhelming. Or you are so full it makes it hard to take it all in. I guess when it’s 24/7 supporting others you don’t always get a chance to grow your own toolkit the same way.

GK: [0:17:36] Yeah. I’m curious how you feel about just being with the community in general, being in Deer Isle in the winter. Does it feel like you’re a part of the community, embedded in the community?

JH: [0:17:53] Yeah. Within seconds of getting here, I feel like there has been such a warm reception. It’s probably a little obvious that we’re outsiders, and there’s been nothing but warmth that we’ve been met with. There’s an incredible kindness and generosity to the folks that are here. We went to a restaurant, and the restaurant owner called the store next door to say, “Hey, are you still open? Some folks want to come over.” And they were well past their closing hours, but they said, “Yeah, sure, I’m still here. Light’s still on. Come on over.” I mean, that sense of community and of just being human together doesn’t always happen in a city. I don’t know how to explain it. I have lived in an urban setting for a while now, but there’s an intimacy that’s sometimes lacking. I feel like that is thriving here. I mean, neighbors are not just people in proximity to one another. Neighbors up here understand when there are deeper kinds of needs. I can feel that already within this amount of time.

GK: [0:19:06] Yeah. That’s wonderful.

JH: [0:19:07] Yeah.

GK: [0:19:08] The premise of the residency, this exchange of ideas, what’s your experience of that been like?

JH: [0:19:18] Oh, delightful. [laughter] There’s not enough time. But in all the right ways. Instead of feeling like you’re exhausted at the end of the day, it’s like an energy – being energized with new ideas and new inputs that carry you. I mean, we’ve been pulling pretty long hours here, but the point is, I feel so much more recharged than I did before I came. I think that that’s the nature of, again, getting the opportunity to work with Phoebe and James in this way. I get to see things through different people’s eyes, and what is new to them may not necessarily be new to me, but there’s other things that we can share with one another, whether that’s things like workshop ideas or different workflows or different systems that we like to use or materials that we like to use. But it’s so much bigger than that, too. It’s how do we approach this idea of engaging communities meaningfully. What does it look like here? What does it look like in a city? What does it look like in a small coastal community? What does it look like with young people from different backgrounds? What does it look like with folks with different mobilities or experience levels? There’s so many different ways that we can think about how we are inclusive to the world around us. Those are the types of exchanges that are really powerful because if I can do things here, there’s so much connection between rural Maine and Boston. I mean, it’s funny; there are, of course, the obvious differences, but the way in which you reach folks that may not normally see themselves in spaces like this – that is about changing the barrier to entry, and that is a common link that we are united by. If we are all dedicated to being more inclusive in all of these different kinds of spaces, whether that’s rural, urban, socioeconomic, we’re going to be doing good work.

GK: [0:21:15] Yeah, that’s wonderful. So, I like the idea of there being an exchange of the tools and the methods and the machine learning and all this stuff, but then also the teaching and the community engagement.

JH: [0:21:34] Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. What is the right amount of structure for a program? What’s the right amount of pre-prepping work so that you can have that out-of-the-oven moment [laughter] and magic can be experienced without it being, “Oh, we got to wait five hours for this to finish?” So, we can really figure out how to tune those experiences to be able to capture somebody, be inclusive and kind, lower that barrier, and figure out this is a space for all of us. In fact, the more that we can have crafters and engineers and artists not just coexisting but exchanging meaningfully with one another, we are going to benefit with outcomes that we cannot anticipate ahead of time. Wonderful things will happen when a knitter or ceramicist or artist share techniques that can inform digital fabrication workflows.

GK: [0:23:01] Yeah. Can you tell me some of the highlights of working either with the community or with the school? I know that’s a lot of things, but I wonder if things stand out to you.

JH: [0:23:17] Yeah, I think, seeing the students last week lighten up and get really, really bright when they were punching – they were doing punch card designs for music boxes, and they started to experiment in ways that they were like, “Oh, I wonder what my name sounds like. I wonder what that shape sounds like. I wonder what …”. Just start doodling on paper. What does chaos sound like? So, they were putting it all to the test very, very quickly, punching holes. Some students were doing sound manipulations in a very analog and mechanical way. And then, they were able to run punched strips through their music box and hear the sounds right away. Some students wanted to use a simulator and the computer to see what longer sequences sounded like. Some were experimenting with Rob to see how can you create sound manipulations and triggered by electronics in a completely different way. We all started with music boxes and punch card coding, but some students ended up on a computer and learning how to use MicroPython to program circuit boards that would then trigger similar sounds in a different way. So, that was a really special moment to be able to see the range of outcomes and the students did not want to leave. They sort of had to be pulled out of their chairs, which is always good. [laughter]

GK: [0:24:42] That’s what you want. Yeah. That’s great. Is there anything from this experience that’s come up for you in talking that we haven’t talked about?

JH: [0:24:56] Gosh. I think that having the space to be able to learn in our different ways – for me, I need contiguous time to be able to get into anything properly. To be able to learn any new thing, I need to be able to have a day where nothing worked, and that was okay, and then the next day, be determined to go back and figure it out. That is not something that we typically afford ourselves in our lives, and it’s an unusual space to be able to enter into. I am very grateful for that because I don’t know that I could have learned as much as I have any other way. It’s difficult to carve that time out when our lives get scheduled pretty tight pretty fast. So, to be able to get away and truly have a residency experience where all other systems are off is a true privilege. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to have this.

GK: [0:26:00] Yeah. That’s wonderful. It’s really nice the way that you are all working together. That seems a little unique. I think residency programs often have other people there, but there’s a sharing of ideas that’s happening.

JH: [0:26:21] Yeah. Sharing of ideas, and also sharing of how to teach. Some of us are more formal educators, and some of us are really not identifying as educators, but we can share and exchange information in creative ways. I think that we can learn from each other. Like, “Oh, that’s a really good strategy for showing what that’s like,” or, “That was something that was really mysterious to me before. But when you visualized it that way, that really helped me.” I think that that can help a lot more people as well. So, coming from very different backgrounds is a wonderful thing because we get to find our common language and figure out how to actually communicate. [laughter]

GK: [0:27:03] That’s great.

JH: [0:27:03] Yeah.

GK: [0:27:05] Well, thanks, Janet. If you feel there’s nothing that’s on the tip of your tongue.

JH: [0:27:11] It’s tough. There’s so much on the tip of –