DIY phase 3, Joe Pankowski

http://thestoryhat.blogspot.com/

http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Story-Hat/

Final Position Statement

Though the process of creating a DIY project I have stuck pretty close to my original idea of creating plans for people to create a zoetrope hat. The most challenging aspect of this process was making a clear and deceive set of instructions for a person other then myself to follow. Usually when I'm making something I put it though a number of edits and these edits are usually built on one another until it works without putting in any consideration that someone would need or want to reproduce it.

The bases for the hat was to create a portable conversation piece that made the wearer a performer. I was inspired on my daily walk from school to the train station and in seeing the various ways street performers have their very own skill to create their own niche in a very difficult profession. I thought about what I would do to survive in such an environment and thats when this idea of the story hat came to me.

I hope that people will see this project and want to reproduce it, but add their own personal touches. For example, instead of making the hat and gears from paper I hope they use other materials and I hope I can encourage them to share their adaptations. I also hope I can get feed back on how to better the instructions. I really see these DIY kits as a launch pad for others creativity.

Joe Pankowski; Story Hat Documentation

The Story Hat, Joe Pankowski

Within The Story Hat project, I would like to create a portable conversation starter in the form of a wearable zoetrope. A zeotrope is an old fashion stop motion viewing machine, that I would like to conceal inside of a hat. The wearer could draw out short stories in an animation then play them in this hat at social gatherings, with friends, or strangers out in public. It would give a chance for the viewer to be creative in inventing new animations and ways to interpret a story or idea, while allowing them to start up conversations and meet new people.
I have always liked old technologies like the zeotrope. These technologies have a certain feel of Victorian novelty, so much time was put in to building them to be elegant and decorative just for the sake of entertainment. These things were also built for leisurely time and were experienced by groups of people. There was also manual labor involved to start these machines; a crank here a pedal there. Now a days we have machines that are more complex bringing us an experience right away without any work. In the case of an i-pod these new technologies may also isolate us in our leisure time rather than bring us together. We put on our head phones and bury our face into that little screen leaving the world around us. The Story Hat is the exact opposite of this experience there is work for the wearer to draw the animations and to crank them to view. The wearer is also not cranking the animation for themselves but for others creating an experience for a group and not the individual.
I envision the end product of this kit being a hat (preferably stove top), with a small hand crank coming out of the side to run the animation, and a two inch wide one inch tall rectangular whole in the hat to view the animation. The animation would be drawn on a strip of paper the length of the interior circumference of the hat. The strip would then be placed into a ring inside the hat that could be rotated with a gear attached to the hand crank. The moving animation could be viewed from the viewing whole back lit by a battery powered led light, hung from the top of the interior of the hat.
I think to distribute this kit I believe I would create a instructional video of me building and describing the piece. Then I would show it being used in a storytelling situation. I could also create printable plans and put them on my website.
The builder of the kit after finishing his or her zeotrope hat could go out into the world as a traveling storyteller. They would be able to switch out different animations with each story they told endlessly changing or adapting their animated tales.