Garage48 Hardware & Arts Riga 2018
Date October 12-14, 2018
Location RTU Design Factory, Ķīpsala, Riga
Public project name Digital AID
Surviving repo Grandma
My role Web development
I remember the object more clearly than the official name. We were building a physical box for medication, something that could help an older person or someone on long-term treatment take the right pills at the right time. Garage48 called the project Digital AID. The repository I still have from the weekend is called Grandma.
The official Garage48 team list names me under web development. That is the digital part I remember building: the software layer around a physical object, where schedules, prescriptions and the state of the device had to become understandable through an interface.
This is also where the old archive got confused. I had a separate Hardware & Arts Riga 2017 page, but the concrete memories I had attached to it, Ķīpsala, the hardware room, the Grandma device, belong here in 2018. The 2017 Garage48 I can actually verify was Circular Economy in Tallinn with the World Cleanup Day team.
Why this one stayed with me
Hardware makes collaboration less abstract. The box has to close. The mechanism has to move. The interface has to talk to something real. Designers, software developers, electronics people and fabricators cannot stay inside their own professional language for very long. In that sense the room itself becomes part of the prototype, temporary infrastructure for making different disciplines understandable to each other.