The biggest challenge in any creative process is to embrace failure. Lots of you teachers, lecturers and group leaders want to foster a hands-on creative process in your students. You want them working fast, failing fast, and learning even faster. Improving a design or invention with constant real-life testing.

We know that sugru is a great material for prototyping ideas and testing stuff out so we thought we would set up sugru PROJECTS, it’s a simple idea where we give second level schools, colleges and universities (anywhere in the world) free sugru to run great projects.

If you run a course just send us a project brief that uses sugru as a prototyping material and we will send you enough free sugru to run the project with your students.
We’re not quite sure what’s going to happen but we know its going to be exciting.

How to:
• Submit your brief on this handy google form by December 16, 2011.
• We’ll supply sugru to the best proposals we get
• You report back the results of your project, we publish the most interesting processes and inventions on the sugru blog
• You and your students get recognition for being kick-ass designers / inventors

To set the ball rolling, we set ourselves the challenge of inventing a way to roll an egg down the stairs without it breaking !!!

This is a friends 1987 2.5L Porsche 944 Turbo. A beautiful car, however, the previous owner had mounted a mobile phone holder to the dash and when he removed it, left a series of prominent holes in the leather trim.

Always up for a challenge, James offered to repair the holes using sugru – and he’s uploaded a step-by-step on Instructables – so if you have this problem, go check it out.

The crucial part in this case was colour matching. Use your 7 Steps Booklet to figure out the closest match and then tweak yourself. In this case he used green, orange, black and white and achieved a surprisingly good match.

See the full step-by-step on Instructables, along with a bunch of other nice car related repairs including repairing a key fob, mounting an aeriel and protecting your car from scratches.

We’re out and about around London a lot this week, here are 3 events with a DIY approach that we’ll be taking part in, and that you might like to come to.

We’ll be doing a workshop at the [Re]design stand at 100% Design this Thursday 22nd September 1-3pm. That’s at Stand A64, 100% Design at Earls Court.

We’re thrilled to be invited to speak at This Happened… this Friday 23rd at the London Metropolitan University (Goulsten Street Building) at 7pm along with four other speakers including Adrian Hon from Six to Start and Amy Pliszka of Bees Beside Us – a collection of expandable living spaces designed for urban bees using natural, biodegradable materials.  The talks are about the ‘making it happen’ part of projects or businesses, and I’ll be talking about some of the lessons learned along the way to inventing sugru and getting it out into the world.

Tickets are free and available on a first come first served basis, register here.

Part lecture, part hacking and making workshop. Chris Sanderson of The Future Laboratory examines how open-sourced software, FabLabs and 3D printing are fostering a new hacker culture in which everyone can become the creator of their own products or brands. We’ve been invited to show you how sugru can help you unleash your inner hacker, and there’ll be some sugru for you to take home as well.  Technology Will Save Us want us all to be able to build and repair technology – at this event on Saturday they’ll show you how to build a circuit with a conductive dough.

Living and Designing in the DIY Age is at the V&A on Saturday 24 September 2011 at 2pm.  Ticket prices: £12 or £5 concessions. Book online at the V&A website or contact the V&A on +44 (0)20 7942 2211

A fantastic new show opens today at the V&A Museum in London.
It’s called the Power of Making and it’s one of the most exciting shows we’ve seen in a long time.

The show is designed to celebrate significant feats of making from around the world and to encourage debate – what is the power of making? is making important today? why?

We’re living in a time where, on one hand, schools are questioning whether they should continue to teach making skills such as woodwork, metalwork, ceramics and glass blowing which are expensive to teach and often have health and safety risks associated (who needs those skills nowadays anyway?), and, on the other hand, enthusiasm for making as a way of life is going through the roof, as demonstrated by communities like instructables, make magazine and sugru.

Now that lots of us no longer need to be able to make things (factories can do that, right?), there’s a huge resurgence in people wanting to get their hands dirty, understand how things work, take control, design, adapt, customise, fabricate and construct everything from clothes to computers to cars.

The exhibition features 100 achievements in making including a few pictured here, Professor Dava Newman’s Bio Suit, Thomas Heatherwicks ‘Spun’ chair, a traditionally made brewery barrel by Alastair Simms, the Makerbot home 3d-printer and, very happily, sugru!
Anyone who’s interested in things and how they’re made, from industry to craft, from high to low tech, age-old to futuristic really shouldn’t miss this show.

We’re super proud that sugru was selected as one of the 100 featured achievements, and a selection of hacks inspired by the sugru community are exhibited in the show which is open from September 6th until January 2nd.  This show get’s 10 stars from us – go see it!

This is one of the most exciting projects ever!
Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

Imagine – all the designs and instructions available for free to build all the machines you need to build your own farm or village! The 50 machines in the set include an open source bulldozer, dairy milker, generator, 3d printer, and my favourite – the microtractor!
This isn’t a concept – it’s real – watch the video!

Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

“The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.”

Chris Anderson, curator of TED says “Your project is amazing. Thrilling, actually…It’s people like you who really give me hope for the future.”
WELL SAID!
Oh and if you agree these guys are doing amazing and important work, think about becoming a true fan. (I just did)

Our friends at Do the Green Thing, working with animators Claire Lever and Steven Boot have made this awesome little movie starring sugru to inspire more people to get fixing and repairing.
Is it just us or does it feel a little bit magic?

This Sunday, along with a bunch of other Entrepreneurs, we’ve been invited to take part in Green Day at Kinsale Arts Week.  It sounds like it’s going to be a pretty interesting event.

I’m planning to show some exciting examples of how the DIY movement and sugru users in particular are taking action in their own lives to live more sustainably by taking a practical, can-do and creative approach to life.
For us, the DIY movement is not just about the immediate repairs, it’s a signal of a fast-growing can-do approach to problems at all levels – from a small repair to the science of climate change.  We’re lucky enough that lots of you who use sugru for small things in your everyday lives, are in touch with us – and so we know that among us are scientists doing super interesting and important work, web developers and designers creating tools and experiences that make life easier and more fun for us all, teachers working with the next generation of can-do’ers and all kinds of other inspiring stories too.  The spirit of the DIY movement and the sugru community is one of not waiting for others to provide solutions, but a willingness to try and getting stuck in.

Bill Liao and Sean O’ Sullivan will be there to speak about tackling climate change with reforestation and sustainable transport technology.

Oh, and it won’t be just talking – we’ll be getting stuck in too, so anyone who’s been wanting to give sugru a try, but hasn’t yet – do come along. We’re hosting a Toy Hospital at 2pm at the Temperance Hall in Kinsale before the talks.

Bring along any toys you have that are in need of a little TLC and we’ll give you free sugru and a helping hand to repair them there and then.  There’ll also be packs to buy in case you’ve been waiting for your chance! The talks start at 3.30, at the amphitheatre in Kinsale College.  Hope to see you there!

Phew! It’s taken me about a week to recover, and I take that as a sign of it’s supreme awesomeness.  The Bay Area Maker Faire is the largest DIY festival in the world.  Not the ‘repaint the kitchen’ kind of DIY but the ‘take control of your life and enjoy doing all kinds of stuff for yourself that people normally think you can’t do for yourself’ kind of DIY.  It’s mecca for us!

A bit of background for newbies – MF is created by Make Magazine, it’s now in it’s 6th year, has about 80,000 visitors over 2 days, and has already spawned several smaller Maker Faires in other cities and more and more community organised mini Maker Faires every year too (one in Seattle this wkd!).

It feels like in the beginning it was quite technology/electronics focused, but every year it’s encompassing more and more kinds of making and doing (now including stuff from growing food to music to astronomy) and for me, that’s what makes it reign over all other festivals.  It’s now really becoming about an approach to life, a place learn and get inspired through trying out, and a symbol of the phenomenal growth in the number of people looking to play a more active role in things and improve them – from where their food comes from to how their schools work.

We loved being part of it again this year, and thank you to all the lovely sugru users locally who helped us out on the booth! Our photos from the weekend are on flickr and facebook.  Apart from the awesomeness of meeting lots of familiar faces and new friendly faces on the sugru booth, there were a bunch of things there that left me wide-eyed, buzzing and blabbing to anyone that would listen, too much for one blogpost, so this is the first of a few posts!

Gever Tully’s talk on the thinking behind Brightworks – an extraordinary school

Gever (Tinkering School, Fifty Dangerous things you should let your children do) talked through the plan for Brightworks, a new school that he and Bryan Welch are opening in September this year, and the learnings and thinking behind it. It blew me away. Brightworks reimagines the idea of school as the intellectual and creative heart of the neighbourhood.  It does away with tests, grades and segmenting by subject, and instead proposes a structure they call ‘an arc’ that allows students of different ages (from 6 to 12) and abilities to learn by addressing a central theme from multiple perspectives together over a cycle that lasts a number of weeks.

Working in teams grouped by the students’ particular interests and choices, they address the theme through self-devised guided projects.  A structure of three phases – exploration, expression and exposition – is used to focus on fostering curiosity, independent thought, and working with others as well as everything else needed to address the subject, skills like reading, calculating, science, engineering, music, drawing, building or whatever else is relevant.

This is a prototype school initially, and will start with around 30 children. To realise the project, it’s necessary for it to be a fee-paying model at the beginning as Brightworks have chosen to get it up and running and learn how well it works rather than go the slow and painful (and unlikely) route of convincing the authorities to adopt it from the outset.  They are committed however to it being a diverse group so there is assistance available for up to half of the families.  One of the most inspiring things for me is that they’re just going ahead and doing it, without worrying about lots of official stuff, because they believe in it so much, and then they can see from there how to improve it, grow it, make it fairer, more official etc. in time. I wish them all the luck in the world and I really look forward to seeing where this goes!
You can watch Gever’s talk from Maker Faire here (26 mins), and read more at www.sfbrightworks.org

PS More Maker Faire best bits to come over the next week or so!

…is on this weekend – and we’re gonna be there!

If you’re in San Francisco, you really can’t let yourself miss the Maker Faire.  It’s a weekend that’s insanely packed full of really inspiring stuff – Makers, Crafters, Musicians, and enough awesome demos and talks (literally hundreds of them) to make your brain swell.  To name a tiny few:

* Google’s Self-Driving Cars, Centre Stage, Sebastian Thrun, Saturday 12pm

* Bring on the Tinkering! Learning from Kids who Make, Innovation Stage, Steve Davee, 11.30am

* The New Race to the Moon: Building a Private Lunar Mission, Bob Richards, Saturday 1pm

* The World’s Simplest Longboard, Make Live Stage, Mark Frauenfelder, Saturday 2pm

* Keeping Urban Livestock, and Butchery Demonstrations at the Food Maker Pavilion.

The spectrum of interests covered is mind-melting – check out the full schedule here.

Team sugru will be there in the main Expo Hall at booth 68 with lots of free sugru samples to give away, and full packs for you to buy as well.  We may also bring some discount codes for future web purchases (…said she with a glint in her eye).  Anyway, if you’re there, we’d love to meet you – come and say hi!

We’re also looking for a few people to work on the booth with us again this year, so if you’re in the area and up for it, get in touch asap!

* 1 day paid work demo’ing sugru and meeting lovely visitors to the sugru booth

* A 2-day pass to the Maker Faire so you have the second full day to just soak up the show

* Lots of sugru and a Hack Things Better t-shirt for you

We’re looking for people for both Saturday and Sunday, just get in touch with James here at sugru for more info: james@sugru.com It’s gonna be great!

We’re off to Dublin this weekend to take part in a new festival that sounds amazing.  It’s called Mindfield International Festival of Ideas, and will take over Merrion Square for the weekend.

The lineup looks fantastic! It includes a booker prize winner, debates on social entrepreneurship, climate change, political reform, the culture of gaming, a hackerspace tent, great food, and lots of free hands-on making workshops for young people – that’s where we’ll be.

On Saturday and Sunday from 1.30pm, we’ll be in the young people’s area chatting with people about sugru and the joys of hacking and repairing in general, and I’ll also be taking part in a few discussions in the Ignition tent in the evenings which I’m really looking forward to!

The promo stuff promises inspiration, controversy and laughter – I can’t wait! Although some of the more high profile events are ticketed at €10, the young people’s area and many of the talks and debates are free – come along, we’d love to meet you!