#005🕹️ Fidget Camp: Stop Searching and Build the Damn Thing
Communities, communities, communities everywhere
Welcome to the Grid Free Minds weekly newsletter.
I landed in SF, land of the builders. I will be here for a sec.
This week we'll be talking about Fidget Camp — a weeklong DIY event in San Francisco, hosted by a group of creative technologists and artists passionate about building a community that enables people to bring their unconventional ideas to life.
The TL;DR is, I’m very entertained and amazed!
Finding Beauty in Local Communities
Auguste Rodin, the French sculptor, once said:
It is not that beauty is lacking in life, but eyes to perceive it.
I've been thinking about how this applies to communities — they're everywhere if we just know how to look. And Fidget Camp is a perfect example right here in San Francisco.
Visiting Fidget Camp Showcase
Fidget Camp is ‘a week of nights-and-weekends DIY skill-share workshops, creative make-athons, and an exhibition.‘ It’s for people with ‘restless hands’.
It is one of those small indie local events, started by a group of friends passionate about the intersection of art, technology, and building things.
The Fidget Camp Showcase was incredible. The quality of production, sheer creativity, and unhinged humor blew me away. People had pretty much 1 week to ship something, and most people here have full-time jobs or other obligations.
But everybody SHIPPED! Ranging from 3D printed hand soap, real-time AI interpretation of videos, art installations with NFC chips, physical keyboards pressed to create generative poems…
The Projects…
One of my favorite projects is from this group of friends who went around SF and took pictures of random homes and turned those houses into merch brands, then made actual merch about them and gifted them to the houses.
I really don’t understand, where the hell did you get these ideas from?
From left to right:
A ‘sugar coat’ — because we all ‘sugar coat things’
A ‘hand soap’ — it actually washes like a soap
A hanging fish — because why not?
A ‘no horse allowed’ sign — I’ve always needed one of these
The builders here seem to share a general sense of Bay Area humor (for lack of a better description), the kind of casually shit-talking, stoned-thinking ideas meeting an accidental invitation to ‘actually build the damn thing’.
Why This Type of Community Building Matters
What I loved so much was this type of community building. It’s local, organic, small-batch, homebrewed. It seems to be easily tapping into a natural ‘Ikigai’ of a collective builders’ passion and profession, providing a network, growth, and comraderie among all participants.
With this short event, people get to express themselves creatively, the stakes are low, and it’s probably tons of fun. In the end, you feel accomplished shipping a project, you celebrate it with all the new friends you just made, and slowly but surely, you form a local network through shared love and interest.
The Network of Community Explorers
When I first heard the concept of Fidget Camp, I thought, ‘Oh well, this is as if Mars College happened in a city.’
And it turns out, my intuition was going somewhere. The 'alternative world' is quite small, and the people who are interested in these kinds of things eventually end up in the same physical spaces.
I originally met two of the co-founders of Fidget Camp Joey and Koi, down at Mars College earlier this year. We became great friends due to our shared background in creative technology and passion about building weird things at the intersection of art, technology, and communities.
Later, I discovered they had co-created Fidget Camp. I thought, well, that was amazing, alongside many other amazing things they've done. They also spend time at Dinacon — ‘The Digital Naturalist Conference’ — another known communal hub for creative technologists.
For 4-6 weeks we join a local partner to host field biologists, interaction designers, engineers, artists, and anyone simply interested in exploring new ways of interacting with nature.
I found out that another co-creator of Fidget Camp is Ash, whom I met at a Cabin (back then it was CabinDAO) Build Week 3 years ago, when I first started my nomadic journey.
I’ve been a huge fan of Ash’s work for years, especially her mastery of Social Media Storytelling and passion for community building. I love seeing her grow as a creative technologist and artist over the years. Fidget Camp has a tangent sister community TIAT — The Intersection of Art and Technology.
Build Your Community, Anywhere
For a while, I thought you had to travel to another country, across the world, to find ‘your people’. — and that still might be applicable on many occasions!
But Fidget Camp proves otherwise. Communities work exactly like Rodin's observation about beauty — it's not that they're lacking, but that we need eyes to perceive them.
Many people experience challenges in finding the ‘right’ communities, but in the end, wherever you are, you most likely can find some group of people with whom you have some things in common. It could be a niche interest, enjoyment of similar sports, a commitment to the same faith, shared goals of quitting the same habits, or simply, waking up around the same time.
We are supposedly in a loneliness epidemic, so many people in Western countries experience loneliness, from the Surgeon General’s statement of the ‘Loneliness Epidemics’, to the thesis of a declining communal scene in the US in Bowling Alone.
But if you really look around, communities are everywhere. If you go out and search, you’ll most likely find them; if you can’t find them, you can most likely build the damn thing to rally them.
SF Bay Area is a hub for frontier-tech founders and now prevalent AI companies, but there are also tons of artistic souls in the city, and an 'urge' from people to express themselves creatively alongside the dominating tech culture here. Fidget Camp is proof that you can create space for that expression, right where you are.
We all know that having the right community superpowers us to create more, better, collaborate, and thrive. We can travel really far to 'find our people', but what if we just build with all the people here already?
Fractal’s awesome initiative to help people launch walkable campus in 6 weeks.
Thank You for Reading :)
What about other cities, what about a village, or a small town? I’m curious to hear more about your journey in community building. What are some of the challenges? What worked well and what didn’t?
Leave a comment if you feel the creative urge to share! 💃
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This blog is a labor of love ❤️
I so relate to the lego guy <3
build build build!