Regarding the joy of creating something
I just finished up what I written about twice already, a hybrid party / festival something deep in the forest of Sweden which I enjoyed deeply and I analyzed some of this after coming home yesterday. I think what we rediscovered was the joy of building something you shape purely out of your own imagination, without requirements and expectations. The act of converting ideas to reality leaves you with a lasting joy that I seldom feel doing the daily grind. Maybe this is why startup founders hold the experience of starting something themselves so dear? This irrestible joy to keep on going that still fuels me after this experience is incredibly strong, to a point where I am already looking forward to creating again.
Why is this? How come we are so bad at making use of this on a continious basis? Why is it so hard to channel this inner energy at work for me? I can sort of use a part of this energy to fuel myself when doing projects but I seldom experience this extremely strong passion. In part I do think it has to do with the feeling of ownership and watching idea materialize to reality. This inner energy that allows you to go from start to goal without ever finding it tedious stems from what I think is the joy of converting an idea into something that has a lasting effect on someone else. Be it a product, a service, an app or a tool, if it changes the day for someone else in a positive way it gives this great energy back to you. The anticipation of this energy return is what I think creates this drive to finish projects like this.
Sometime in March 2018 I got the idea that I wanted to build this sign for the festival, as it would fit the aesthetic style of the festival. Sort of rough and old but still a modern glow with the LED tube. Said and done, started ordering the stuff needed and sketching out how this thing would actually be built. Turned out to be surpringsly simple, so I’m sharing how I approached it.
First of all, the sort of general outline of the sign had to be created and for this I used Adobe Illustrator to just draw the “visible” parts of the sign.
Then it was a question of figuring out where the holes for the LED tube to go through had to be drilled
After this it was just a puzzle of finding the optimal path for the tube in order to avoid having to cut the tube as I would not be able to bring any soldering gear to Sweden. The yellow basically highlights the entire run of the tube coming in and out of the feeding holes.
With all this done, the only thing left was to wait until the building phase for the festival started and sketch it all out on the piece of plywood.
With that done, we drilled out the holes and started feeding through the LED tube, in order to fixate it we used an array of smaller holes through which we fed nylon wire and tied it to get the curves.
This all took a fair bit of time. If someone ever attempts this again I highly recoomend finding another solution than manually fixating nylon wire to screws. Johanna’s fingers did not enjoy this after 1,5 day of building this sign. The reason for doing this was to not have any visible markings as you get with steel wire but have the sign look like it was glued in place.
After finishing the sign, Johanna painted the bar with UV reactive colors and Alexander and Summa fixated the UV fixtures so it all could come together like this
