At some point in your academic or professional experience, you might find that you want to express yourself through your work in a way you don’t quite have the tools or knowledge to do. This post is a collection of some thoughts about how to respond to that feeling— especially if you’re an engineer, who might find you want to express yourself through built environments and artifacts; or an artist, who might find you want the embodiments of your work to be more technical and intentional. You might find your interests overlap engineering, design, and art, and wonder what mediums across those fields can be used for expression. If that resonates with you, this page is for you— a little space where I keep tips and resources I wish I had when I was an undergrad, primarily relating to creative technology.
And full disclosure: I’m not an expert! Just sharing insights as I’m accumulated them. Around my junior year at Carnegie Mellon, I realized this was the space I was most interested in, and luckily I found a community of like-minded peers— but there’s a lot I wish I learned sooner, and that’s what I hope this page contains. This is slightly oriented towards physical/hardware people who started in engineering, as that’s my experience, but hopefully any undergrad with an interest in creative uses of technology can find some value here.
Work
It’s hard to find great creative tech work, and most likely you won’t find work in the same way most disciplines might, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! Here are some ways I’ve seen my peers find great work.
Explore this exceptional list github.com/j0hnm4r5/awesome-creative-technology by Johns Mars, a coworker of mine when I worked at Deeplocal. It is, as far as I know, the only resource for finding companies that hire people specifically with creative tech interests. It will give you a great idea of what work is out there
If you’re art/humanities focused, subscribe to Words of Mouth to see many opportunities that aren’t posted to job sites like LinkedIn.
Set a job alert on LinkedIn for searches that are just words related to tools or methods you like— i.e. instead of searching “design technologist” or “interactive engineer,” search for “Arduino” or “p5js”
Look in academia— If you’re an undergrad looking for research experience, when you see a new professor is hired at your school in something you’re interested in, read some of their papers. If you’re hooked on their work, send them an email saying you’ve read their papers, are excited for them to come to your school, and would love to know if they expect they’ll need research assistants with your skills.
Check alternative job boards like jobs.codeforamerica.org and jobs.adafruit.com.
Community
Community and collaboration are a great part of the creative tech world. Beyond social media (though Twitter is a great place to find your peers), here are some places you might find like-minded people:
Newsletters are great ways of finding interesting work, ideas, and people. Subscribe to them and see what webs you can form when you dig into their content. Many newsletters also have communities (Slack, Discord, etc.) that connect people with shared interests. One I love is from theprepared.org.
Academic Conferences and Journals can also be a great way of connecting yourself with people whose work you admire. Make a habit of peeking at the best paper and honorable mentions from CHI, UIST, SIGGRAPH, UbiComp, and Transactions on Affective Computing, and start to see what inspires you (and what does not). If there’s a paper you want to read but don’t have access to, just email the author, 99% of the time they’re more than happy to share a PDF. As your interests become more niche, you may find that connecting with authors of papers you admire is a helpful way of finding other ideas that inspire you, and perhaps even research opportunities.
Physical Spaces, like labs and studios, are the easiest places to meet the people who will inspire you. These spaces often have a connections that expands across time and place, forming a much larger community than who you may see in the room. This is true for may research labs or studios. At Carnegie Mellon, these spaces are large and numerous, like The Studio for Creative Inquiry, The Morphing Matter Lab, TechSpark, and many others. Similar spaces likely exist in your world, but may take some digging to find.
Portfolios
If you have a design background, you probably already have a portfolio and it’s way better than mine will ever be. But, if you started in engineering, there isn’t conventionally a push to document and share your work online, so a portfolio may feel daunting. There are many many resources online about how to make a great portfolio, so there are only two things I’ll say:
Firstly, you can get a domain name and hosting free with your university email address. If you have a .edu email address, you can get a free (for 1 year) domain from Namecheap for Education, and then can use GitHub Pages for free hosting. It’s extraordinarily easy way to put your projects online— though a little tedious to set up initially, it’s exceptional that it’s basically free.
Secondly, 99% of the portfolios you admire are just Squarespace. Of course, plenty of people code from scratch, or boilerplates like Bootstrap, or low code tools like WebFlow— and that’s really cool. But that’s because they may want their portfolio itself to be part of their portfolio. Very meta and exciting, but if you’re a mechanical engineer with no web dev experience, don’t be intimated: you’re not trying to do the same things as someone who studied visual design. There’s no shame in using Squarespace or other site builders so you can focus on sharing your work, and not on becoming a web designer. Though it is expensive, there is usually pretty okay student pricing.
Getting Your Projects Some Clout Online
So you’ve seen projects featured online that you admire, and wondered how to get your projects a bit of buzz. I think it’s way easier than most might expect. So say you’re really proud of your senior capstone or research project and you want a little clout, there’s many ways to do that, but here’s my trusted method:
Step 1: Document your project really well
This may be second nature for a design student, but for an engineer less so. Here’s some suggestions:
Horizontal and landscape videos and photos taken across the duration of the project.
High quality “hero shots” that show the final product.
A 5-ish sentence summary of what your project is and why it’s interesting.
If relevant, time-lapse videos of assembling something satisfying are particularly compelling.
If relevant, a couple gifs from your videos (GIPHY Capture and GIF Brewery are simple ways to do this).
Once you’ve collected all your content, make sure all media is in an easy to open and share format (JPG, PNG, GIF, MPEG). Put everything in a Google Drive folder, and don’t forget to set link sharing to “anyone with the link can view this.”
Step 2: Share your Content Tactically
First, submit your project to Hackaday at hackaday.com/submit-a-tip and any relevant Reddit communities like r/raspberry_pi or r/arduino. Make sure you give Hackaday all the information they’d need and include that google drive link from Step 1, as well as a link to your portfolio if you have one. For Reddit, upload a 1ish minute video with a succinct and engaging title, like “my friends and I made this thing using these tools/methods/parts.”
If you can get your project on Hackaday, or it performs well on Reddit, more than likely other outlets will follow. Especially helpful is listing any technologies you’ve used (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc); this will make it more likely that your work is written up on those company’s blogs and websites. If it makes the leap from Hackaday to Hackster, RPi Blog, and Arduino Blog, it has a chance of leaping to Make Magazine and Mashable. From there, it’s on its own, and will likely get some traction.
Etc.
This post is written by me, Taylor Tabb. I am absolutely not an expert, but there’s so little content out there like this that I still feel it’s worth sharing. This is very much a version 1.0 of this content, and as I gain new insights, I’ll write some more. A visual note: the green/blue horizontal bars on this page come from radio telescope data I collected of our solar system’s hydrogen line.
Feel free to send me your thoughts, suggestions, or hate mail using the form below 🙂