Jie Qi loves to make things

2009 November 4
by Terri

Jie Qi is majoring in mechanical engineering at Columbia University, and as her website says, she loves to make things.

Now, sometimes adding electronics to classic kids toys just makes them obnoxious, but this popup book, done with Dr. Leah Buechley as part of the High-Low Tech group in the MIT Media Lab, is an amazing example of how electronics can enhance in a beautiful way:

Today and Tomorrow also featured some beautiful paper/electronic flowers she made, that move and open much like real flowers would.

Paper flowers blooming from Jie Qi on Vimeo.

I love how hardware hacking can be so beautiful. I’ll bet that’s not the first thing some people think of when they think of neat hardware projects, but I’ve seen a lot of really lovely things out there. Feel free to show off your own stuff in the comments: complete, incomplete, or even not quite started.

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This post was written by terri.

Terri is a web security researcher, open source developer, teacher, amateur photographer, geek, gamer, and yes, a girl. She blogs/tweets under the name terriko, and maintains a web security blog at WebInsecurity.net.


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7 Responses
  1. November 4, 2009

    Oh, those are gorgeous!

  2. November 4, 2009

    As a book person I <3 that book.

    Now I'm totally wondering what could happen to a children's illustrated book using that kind of thought process.

  3. November 4, 2009

    That’s amazing.

    I’d love to see what this kind of thinking could lead to in a story book rather than a gorgeous pop up book.

  4. November 4, 2009

    Oh, on the subject of projects I want to do, here’s a neat lit-up cuff that my friend Katie made. It’s on my list of cute projects to make, and as well as being potentially very pretty, it could be a reasonably practical thing for me now that daylight savings time is done and I’m often walking or biking home from work in the dark. It’s always a good ideas to have extra lights on you, even as a pedestrian. Maybe if I get some extra conductive velcro, I could make one for my grandma when she’s walking the dog, too…


    Edit: the sparklab link for making the cuff is currently flagged as dangerous, so here’s more pictures and description on Make for those of you who are curious, but not that curious.

  5. November 5, 2009

    These things are beautiful. If they were for sale somewhere, the market would be tremendous.

  6. Carla Schroder permalink
    November 5, 2009

    Absolute gorgeous, thanks for finding this!

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