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Hackerhouse

DIY Tinkering, Tech x Art

We mess around with art, engineering, science and do some independent research. Sometimes it’s silly weekend builds, sometimes long-term investigations into questions we care about. It might be a DIY sensors for plant monitoring, projection mapping experiment, random electronics projects, interactive displays for neighborhood data, tools for archival & curation, open source contributions, building a ocaml compiler, some backyard science experiment, and whatever hyperlocal problems we might be working on.

Our goal here is to learn things and share our learnings with the world and have fun along the way and make friends(humans or otherwise :). We believe that you can just do things (provided you have thought enough and are on the edge to do it or not). You just have to fuck-around-and-find-out,

Philosophy

We’re passionate advocates of several interconnected but distinct philosophies. First, we embrace Aaron Swartz’s fight for open knowledge - his conviction that “information is power” and that sharing research, data, and cultural knowledge is “a moral imperative,” not a privilege for the few. Second, we support Richard Stallman’s vision of free software - the four freedoms to run, study, redistribute, and modify code so that users control their computing rather than being controlled by it. Third, we encourage Maggie Appleton’s concept of “home-cooked software” - building personal, custom tools “with care and love, not commercial interests” that serve the specific needs of your community rather than mass markets.

While we believe deeply in these movements and in learning through struggle and doing things the hard way, we refuse to let these principles become barriers to participation. For free software specifically, our values guide our approach, but they don’t dictate your tools. Whether you’re prototyping with proprietary software or using whatever gets the job done - if it serves our shared goals of community building, local knowledge creation, and meaningful making, we’re here for it. These philosophies were about democratizing access and empowering communities. Ideological purity that excludes people contradicts that very spirit.

Experiments

For our experiment focus, We want to understand the fundamentals of things but also dance on the edge of the future and figure what’s next. Our experiments span across domains we care about: nature and ecology (environmental sensors, plant monitoring, climate adaptation tools), mapping and place-based knowledge (hyperlocal documentation systems, community asset mapping), social infrastructure (local data platforms, mutual aid coordination tools), human-computer interaction (alternative interfaces, learning systems), archival work (traditional knowledge preservation, community documentation platforms), wellbeing tools (neighborhood resilience, offline-first applications), making and craft (fabrication documentation, skill-sharing systems), and playful interventions (interactive installations, community celebration tools).

These aren’t separate silos but interconnected experiments where ecological monitoring might feed into community mapping, traditional knowledge archival connects to modern learning interfaces, and wellbeing tools emerge from understanding local social networks. We’re particularly interested in how technology can serve communities rather than extract from them, how digital tools can enhance rather than replace embodied knowledge, and how local-first approaches create genuine value for neighborhoods.

Digital activism

Our Digital Warrior focus centers on building community-controlled infrastructure that serves both local resilience and global digital rights. We develop practical skills and tools for digital sovereignty while contributing to global knowledge commons. It integrates with our experimental approach, hyperlocal community building, and vision of technology serving rather than extracting from communities.

  • Emergency & Crisis Resilience: We build mesh networking, homelab services, and offline-resilient tools for Guwahati’s monsoon floods, power cuts, and potential shutdowns, connecting to our mutual aid networks for neighborhood resilience.
  • Privacy & Security Education: We run workshops on digital security for activists, journalists, and organizers, covering secure communication, data protection, and privacy-respecting alternatives.
  • Community-Controlled Technology: We experiment with self-hosted services and alternative platforms, using our homelab to test community-owned infrastructure that keeps data under local control.
  • Transparency & Accountability Tools: We develop tools for community documentation and data journalism, including air quality tracking, flood mapping, and participatory mapping for Northeast India advocacy.
  • Government Technology Surveillance & Accountability: We monitor and analyze government technology deployments, policy implementations, and surveillance systems to build citizen awareness and accountability. This includes tracking digital rights legislation changes, documenting surveillance technology rollouts (facial recognition, data collection systems), following advocacy organizations like CIS India and Internet Freedom Foundation, and educating communities about technologies being used on them. We create tools for citizens to monitor government tech spending and effectiveness, maintain archives of policy changes and court cases, and develop practical skills for digital rights advocacy. This connects directly to our hyperlocal organizing work, as understanding what technologies operate in our neighborhoods enables more informed community responses to digital governance challenges.
  • Knowledge Preservation & Digital Archival: We create systems for preserving traditional knowledge and cultural practices in digital formats while maintaining community ownership and supporting intergenerational knowledge transfer.
  • Global Commons Contribution: We document experiments and publish tools as open source, turning local solutions for Guwahati’s challenges into building blocks for global digital sovereignty movements.

Research

For our research related stuff, Our intention is to actually publish independent research papers, publications but it might just be informally documenting our results aswell. We do research engineering. We use science to understand systems, and we use engineering to control them. Taking papers and results, then experimenting with them, trying to replicate the results, building prototypes, documenting what works and what doesn’t. The knowledge and tool-creation reinforce each other. We start by understanding how things work, then build tools to control or influence them.

Taking up a broad problem statement and getting your hands dirty can have a snowball effect helping you discover more specific and impactful problem statements to focus on. - aditya on tw

Being realistic about our makeshift setup and indie lab capabilities, our mission isn’t necessarily to create novel inventions (though we’d welcome them), but to understand current systems and establish evidence for hyperlocal questions. When trees are cut at Dighalipukhuri, we ask: what species were removed? What ecological effects will this have? How does this impact our microclimate? Local universities may study these questions, but the research often stays academic and inaccessible to the community experiencing the changes.

Our approach is to serve as a hyperlocal knowledge bridge - connecting with institutions already doing relevant research, translating findings for community understanding, and filling documentation gaps through citizen science. We make invisible systems visible, preserve traditional ecological knowledge from elders before it’s lost, and build collective intelligence about where we live. It’s about understanding when development hinders nature and ecology, having logical community responses, and fostering empathy for our shared environment. Whether we conduct research ourselves, amplify existing academic work, or advocate for research prioritization, the goal is community-accessible knowledge that serves neighborhood resilience and understanding.

Maker culture

Our maker culture embraces fafo, learning by doing, failing, and sharing knowledge openly. We practice both DIY (self-sufficiency) and DIWO (collaborative making) philosophies, where experienced makers mentor newcomers while fresh perspectives challenge established approaches. Knowledge flows multidirectionally across disciplines, someone debugging electronics might get insights from a woodworking neighbor, while traditional craft practitioners inspire new approaches to digital fabrication.

The tools we build address neighborhood needs: environmental sensors for community data, interactive installations for public engagement, documentation systems for preserving traditional knowledge. We also build infrastructure for the space itself - computer shrines and ambient displays that make community knowledge visible, responsive environmental systems that track building health and occupancy patterns, and interactive installations that turn the building into a collaborative interface for neighborhood understanding. The Makerspace gives us the tools, the nursery provides living systems to interface with, and the building becomes our testing ground for community-centered innovation. We’ve got basic tools for creative coding, electronics, woodworking, and when we need specialized equipment, we probably know someone who can help. If we don’t, we figure it out together - that’s half the fun!

We also want to actively recreate projects/tools that we find fascinating, not to copy, but to deeply understand the underlying processes, techniques, and systems thinking involved. This practice of “learning through recreation” is fundamental to developing intuitive understanding of how things work. When we encounter compelling work - whether it’s an interactive installation on social media, a clever hardware hack from a maker’s blog, or an elegant software tool - we ask: “How did they build this? What principles are at play? What would our neighborhood-scale version look like?” Then we dive in, document our process, and share both our attempts and our learnings.

Games, Toys

We create and explore the full spectrum of play experiences. Games, toys, and interactive installations as cultural vehicles that flow through the Create → Play → Popularize → Spread cycle. What we design during maker time becomes the actual content for our play/events programming, then spreads beyond the space to become self-replicating cultural units that connect neighborhoods and preserve community knowledge.

Our explorations span programming challenges (Project Euler-style math puzzles, Cryptopals security challenges), traditional games and folk toys (documenting and learning games from elders, exploring regional variations, understanding cultural transmission through play), modern board games and card games, interactive toys for all ages (Desktop Goose-style desktop companions, physical gadgets and installations), educational play tools (Unix Pipe Card Game, Natural Number Game), creative challenges, fantasy consoles and emulators (PICO-8 games, retro gaming experiences), physical competitions (speedcabling, server throwing, real-world treasure hunts like geocaching), and hybrid experiences using our computer shrines and interactive displays.

We reverse engineer existing play experiences to understand mechanics and systems thinking, create DIY versions of fascinating things we discover online (from sandspiel physics to Little Alchemy combinations), learn traditional games from community elders as part of our intergenerational knowledge preservation, and design entirely new games, toys, and interactive experiences that bridge traditional wisdom with contemporary possibilities. See https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research

The essence of play becomes both design principle and distribution mechanism - experiences that are genuinely engaging spread organically through schools, family gatherings, and street corners. This transforms play from consumption to creation, where community members become both players and designers, contributing to an evolving local culture of interactive experiences that reflects the creativity, traditional knowledge, and contemporary innovation of our neighborhood.

Interactive experiences

Beyond traditional and digital play, we actively explore experiences that bridge the seen and unseen, allowing us to perceive the invisible rhythms of our environment and hear the unheard voices within our communities. Drawing inspiration from concepts in mixed reality, pervasive computing, and digital placemaking, we design interventions that augment our physical surroundings with layers of digital narrative and interaction. This might involve experiments like using QR codes to “converse” with trees, revealing their ecological data or weaving tales from local folklore, interactive installations where environmental sensors translate the health of a local pond into a visual symphony, or historical photographs of a street corner manifesting as holographic overlays. These experiments transform our neighborhood into a living, interactive canvas, fostering deeper connections with nature, local history, and the subtle data streams that shape our shared reality, turning everyday spaces into sites of discovery, empathy, and playful inquiry.

Shared Infrastructure & Support Systems

  • Reclaimed material depot: Organized storage for community waste streams that can become fabrication materials. Community donations of interesting objects, broken electronics, unusual hardware, and “might be useful someday” finds. Salvaged components, spare parts, interesting mechanisms from discarded items. Random materials collection following maker culture philosophy - old computer parts, interesting metal pieces, unique fasteners, broken toys with good motors, unusual materials that spark creativity. Organized storage system for diverse collected materials with basic categorization (electronics components, mechanical parts, raw materials, project inspirations)
  • Tool library system: Check-out system for personal projects, maintenance schedules, replacement planning