Philosophy

Gesso is a creative community on a mission to research and develop new ways for communities to develop custom hardware systems to solve problems and explore interests that are typically considered impractical because of the amount of technical work required to produce practical systems in a form that can actually be useful. What does this mean? Well, there are assumptions that we make when we work with hardware. Usually, we aren't aware of these. That's why they're assumptions. We think they are simply the way they are because that's the way they need to be.

Concepts

There are a number of concepts central to Gesso that are important to understand its motivation and philosophy. These concepts form the core of our outlook on creating interactive systems as a community and the importance of community in sustaining diversity and organic innovation that helps creativity communities thrive.

Interactive Self-Assembly
DIY as Method of Product Manufacturing and Distribution

Principles

Gesso is designed based on a number of princples:

• stretchy: distributable, allows boards to be freely moved around an environment, embedded in it in different ways, and adapted
• combinable: stackable, allows the boards that provide computational function to be concentrated within space
• embeddable
• flexible
• allow iterative creation of working systems: all systems built are functional systems to the greatest possible extent and provide a continuous feedback to inform decisions until the system is considered done
• able to replicate