Gallery: Self-Destructive Chairs and Bike-Mounted Catapults Dominate in Global Hackathon
01self-destruct-chair
When you give a group of makers a vague instruction to deconstruct an idea and build something out of it in 48 hours, you get some outlandish results. It's exactly what the team behind [The Deconstruction](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/design/2013/02/the-deconstruction/) wanted for its two-day, global hacker competition that took place this past weekend. The projects from over 50 participating teams varied from full-length musical albums and an iPhone-powered disco ball to a Rube Goldberg machine that demonstrates the process of photosynthesis. On the whole, these projects are here to remind us that makers aren’t always 3-D printing fanatics or hardware hackers — they can include anyone, whether a musician, designer, engineer, or child. The official winners of the event will be announced later this week. Meanwhile, here are six of our favorites. Self-Destructing Musical Chair A team of current and former design students in Lausanne, Switzerland’s University of Art and Design deconstructed the game of musical chairs. To team [Les Sugus](http://thedeconstruction.org/team/les-sugus/), the game was finite, so they wanted to create a chair that, too, was finite. The group designed a seat that would only survive nine sittings — one for each member of the team — until it automatically destructs. To do this, Les Sugus constructed a chair with cast wax joints. They then attached an Arduino board to the chair, along with a contact switch to detect that a person is sitting in it. A solenoid hits the chair and signals the number of seatings left, and a relay box finally switches on the self-destruct heating system to melt the wax away. Slowly, but inevitably, the chair is destroyed, hilariously sending the final sitter to the floor. [#iframe: http://player.vimeo.com/video/60475086](660x371)|||||| *Image: Les Sugus*
02rube-goldberg-photosynthesis
Photosynthesis as Rube Goldberg Machine The [Carrots of Patagonia](http://thedeconstruction.org/team/the-carrots-of-patagonia/), a team based in Lyon, France, spent its 48 hours deconstructing the biological process of photosynthesis into a working Rube Goldberg machine. Each step of the team’s machine represented a step in photosynthesis. The Rube Goldberg machine starts off with a light bulb swinging to hit Lego dominoes, representing a light photon hitting a plant’s thylakoid membrane, and beginning the process of photosynthesis. In the end, the machine “produces” sugar, which is represented by sugar being flung off a spoon. The machine was nothing fancy compared to [other Rube Goldberg machines](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/record-breaking-rube-goldberg-machine-pops-balloon-in-300-steps/) — they built it from basic parts like cardboard, Lego pieces, rubber bands, marbles, and string. That said, the five-person team was able to create a machine-model of photosynthesis for less than 35 euros (around $45). *Image: The Carrots of Patagonia*
03musical-deconstruction
Music Album of Deconstructed Genres The Deconstruction didn’t just limit its teams to makers of physical objects and machines. [Bozo Nightmare](http://thedeconstruction.org/team/bozo-nightmare/), an eight-member team based in Los Angeles, spent its 48-hours to deconstructing different genres of music and ended up with a full album. Dennis Michael, a graduate student at Caltech, solicited help from various contributors from across the world. “In keeping with the theme of deconstruction and taking things out of context, one of the things we did here was I had somebody put headphones on and listen to a song and play a guitar solo over the song, and we only recorded the solo and not the rest of the song,” he explains. The result was an album of improvised and mashed up music and sounds, reconstructed from already popular songs like Sweet Home Alabama and non-music samples like a reading of The New York Times. [#iframe: https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Fusers%2F36434662](100%x440)|||||| Image: Bozo Nightmare
04zombie-survival
Zombie Survival Tools Of all the teams taking part in the event, [Rabbit Hole](http://thedeconstruction.org/team/rabbit-hole/) was one of the most traditionally maker-focused. The Rochester, MN team was made up of nine current IBM and Mayo Clinic engineers and “tinkerers.” The team focused on several projects that would be useful in a Zombie Apocalypse — essentially, survival tools. This included a foraging bike trailer, a solar-powered lantern and an automatic can/brain crusher. Of the three, the can crusher seemed the most challenging. Beyond the tires and wood, the machine required a garage door opener (along with sensors and wired), an Arduino Uno, an electric dartboard, and several transistors, resistors and LEDs. They even added a dancing robot to the can crusher, although they found that it “required too much power to be powered straight from the Arduino,” and limited the dancing to every 12 cans crushed. The team also jokingly added, “Glue, zip-ties, solder, blood, sweat and duct tape,” to its list of components. *Image: Rabbit Hole*
05seed-bombing
Neighborhood Seed, Haiku and Story Bombs With six adults and five children (ages 3 to 6), team [Hello City](http://thedeconstruction.org/team/hello-city/) deconstructed a suburban neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia by creating three projects that “bombed” the neighborhood — with good things, of course. The first device was a mobile seed-bombing catapult. The catapult was constructed onto a cargo bike, loaded with plenty of seed-bomb ammo. Deconstructing the neighborhood didn’t only require building a new type of machine. The Hello City team also used their 48 hours of maker time to bomb their suburb with haikus and short stories. The haiku bombing was “partly inspired by the graffiti tag – eternity – which first appeared written in chalk on the footpaths of Melbourne in the 1930s and later in Sydney.” Instead of tagging eternity, the team tagged various haikus on streets, footpaths, walls and more. Finally, short stories were pasted onto telephone poles throughout the area. http://www.youtube.com/embed/JNqAfF3ZCX8 *Image: Hello City*
06iphone-disco-ball
iPhone Disco Ball San Francisco-based team [Ouroboros](http://ouroborosdiscoball.tumblr.com/) spent its time deconstructing the disco. The team, headed by Schlomo Rabinowitz, created both an app and a giant disco ball called the "Ouroboros Discoball". The disco ball itself was made out of a foam-filled exercise ball. But it required smartphones (iPhones, specifically) and the Ouroboros app to actually get a disco ball effect. After completing the project, Ouroboros threw a pizza party in San Francisco's Mission district, and invited their friends to partake in the disco. Each person downloaded the app on their phones, and attached all of the phones onto the disco ball. The app's moving green bubbles and flashy bright lights gave the ball a digital disco look. *Image: Ouroboros*
