National Festival of Making – E-Waste Scavenging with Noisy Toys

60 million Tonnes of e-waste is discarded every year. Let’s pop the consumer bubble with screwdrivers and pliers!

Drop in for a quick activity or stay longer to un-make some e-waste and then create something new with your scavenged treasure.

During this workshop, you can have a go at breaking, fixing, making, tinkering, upcycling.

Un-boxing: dismantling obsolete computers and other dead tech, we find beautiful colourful cables, sci-fi city-scape circuit boards, hack-able motors and intriguing mysterious things… Feel free to bring your own dead tech for Un-Making, but only if it is genuine waste and cannot be repaired.

Reanimation: we dip our toes into the world of electromagnetism, building robotic contraptions, decorative artwork, noise instruments and useful devices from the scavenged components.

Digital alchemy: We will gradually add our creations to the workshop space, building an ever-growing installation of inside-out tech with moving parts, buttons to press, robotic Samba rhythms, variable entropy and colourful computer guts.

Noisy Toys provide workshops, shows, interactive installations, walkabout, drop-in educational activities and noise for events, schools and other groups. They specialise in hands-on Tinkering & Making activities that encourage experimentation, creative thinking, playful learning and real-world applications of scientific, technical and creative knowledge.

Noisy Toys is run by the artist Stephen Summers and operates as a Trading name for Scavengers Labs, a Community Interest Company run by Mick Chesterman & Stephen Summers.