Floating, Bamboo Makerspace

We hope that this new public facility will have a long life in Dumaguete. It has already been revitalizing the Banilad beach neighborhood, and serve as a symbol for the magnificence under the sea. It will also be a hub for community creators of art, science, and technology. We hope it can be facility that empowers the locals to understand their environment and draw eco-tourists to explore the amazing natural areas in this region.

Currently there are several projects already underway:

• Leading more floating electronics workshops
• Building a glowing floating protective barrier around the reef
• extensive water quality sensing projects in multiple sites
• a touring performance series discussing the importance of conservation

And finally, in my own career (I'm starting as a new professor in Singapore!), I hope to more extensively research the creation of mobile laboratories for exploring nature in situ. http://andy.dorkfort.com/andy/digitalnatural/

Bayanihan

Bayanihan is a great word I learned from my filipino friends during this project. It somewhat means "community spirit directed towards a goal." It more concretely refers to an old tradition of getting a community together and literally carrying a community member's house to a new place when they needed to move.

My friends pointed out that when we got the whole community together to move the boat into the ocean, we revived this old tradition quite literally. The image of us rounding up the neighborhood to all help carry this huge boat into the water made them all recall the ancient island traditions, and the sense of community spirit it invokes. More info and pictures about Bayanihan are available here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_work#Bayani...

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/bayanihan/bayanwor...

Community Spirit

Keeping any large-scale project alive ultimately relies on the community taking ownership of it. As an outsider, I did not just want to bulldoze my own values over those of the community. Instead dedicate time and resources to connecting with the neighborhood with whom you will work and listen to what the important issues and challenges they face are.

Build Pride

Chances are, your large outsider project might seem strange to the people living there. Thus you are faced with the challenges of both explaining what the projects are, but how they can help and why the community should have pride in them.

Simple things like branding equipment and making t-shirts helps establish both respect for the tools and ownership within the community of these tools. You should also host lots of public events where people of different social classes can come together. Also make sure to provide plenty of incentives for people to come; in the philippines, this meant FOOD :)

Since it is a modular system, the whole lab can be installed on new sites with (relative) ease!

While floating, the whole raft can be towed or pushed to new locations by only a couple of people.

The modules can also be detached from each other, and function independently as smaller rafts! As mentioned earlier, the only downside to independently floating rafts, is that they wiggle more when larger waves hit, and can cause sea-sickness while soldering.

The modules can be carried over land by a group of 10-14 people (they are HEAVY). They can be loaded onto cars and moved wherever they need to go next! If moving the raft from one environment to the other, be careful about checking to see if you might be introducing invasive lifeforms to the new place.

Data isn't much use if you can't connect it back to the people that it matters to. This is why we had a whole team coming up with artistic ways of sharing this work back to the public through visualizations.

They had two primary visualization systems they implemented: Waterfall Projection + LED Strips

Waterfall Projection

The team made an amazing video-display screen where footage from the submarine or other videos can be displayed directly on a sheet of FALLING WATER. It's SO COOL! They even built their own homebrew system

LED STRIPS

They also hooked up a system to visualize less visual data. They have 4 strips of addressable LED strips that they use to display weather and water quality data.

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Bantay Basura (Garbage Guard)

Keeping the reef healthy starts with stopping the trash from going into it. I hired a group of awesome little neighborhood kids to become the official "Bantay Basura" or "Garbage Guard."

They have been doing an excellent job keeping the site clean from the ground up!

Foundation University Precious Plastics Program

One group is building a philippine version of the Precious Plastic program: http://preciousplastic.com/en/

They help build some of these open-source tools for taking plastic garbage from the sea, and reusing it as useful items. For instance they already have made lots of simple devices for shredding plastic bottles into string which we can tie bamboo together.

Sea Sense

The Sea Sense group develops an automated multi-sensor technology to monitor seawater quality parameters (pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity).

A pumping machine is utilized to extract seawater sample between 5ft to 10ft depth. The data gathered can be translated into meaningful information for the fishermen to monitor the fish productivity in Banilad Marine Sanctuary.

We also got to work with a performing arts crew. Their goal is to inject a message of environmentalism and good uses of technology to the public by hosting a series of theatrical plays in Banilad and the surrounding community.

They could use the BOAT Lab as a performance space to draw attention to the lab, and the important environment in which it floats.

The performance group worked with all the other teams to get to know the site and technology. They even turned lots of items from our work into props (such as the net I cut off the reef).

The Play

Their play is about how many large evil companies are going around the philippines, tricking poor people into working for them to destroy the only resources in their land and moving on. In the play the poor villagers accidentally help create a "GARBAGE MONSTER" who starts uncontrollably killing the natural areas that are the key to their livelihoods.

This is based off of current events happening on their Island of Negros, where companies, (like the big Power Company) are chopping down whole forests of old-growth jungle and then greenwashing these misdeeds through seemingly flimsy environmental efforts. They performed this play in our Banilad community, and are touring around the Island of Negros now!

The boat lab is going great! For each project log, i am going to add a highlight to some of the amazing projects we have going on! First up the submarine!

We want the sea to be open to all! Some people don't have the physical abilities to actually go snorkeling or scuba diving.

For this reason and important feature of our boat lab was an accessible submarine. This can be piloted around the reef nearby from up on the boat lab. It can visually monitor the health of the reef and give people a first encounter with robotics. It also has built in lights so it can explore the reef even during the night when it is harder for humans to go down there themselves.

We were lucky to have won this submarine (which we dubbed "Sabmarino" in the local dialect) from a previous instructable contest. It is an OpenROV 2.7 kit. Building the submarine from the kit was a valuable workshop in itself.