De-Sign Day 2024

Do you ever wince a bit thinking about where political signs go after the election?  What if, instead of sending those signs to the landfill they became raw material to build cool things?  Seen through a child's eye, these signs transform into a blank canvas for invention.  Join us on April 13th, 2024 from 11am-4pm, where we will "De-Sign", explore, invent and create, inspiring each other along the way. This is a grassroots free event hosted at the Genesis Creative Collective.  Students at ACE Academy started in 2022 taking the lead researching new ways to use old political signs as building and tinkering material. This 3rd annual De-Sign day is sponsored by Austin School for the Driven and is just one station in the Austin Mini Maker Faire that is organized by Austin Tinkering School, Clearview Sudbury school, City Theatre, Genesis Presbyterian Church and Patterson Park. Children and adults can unleash their creativity and explore what an old sign can become.  A folding lego table top? A boat? Or an earring display stand? This is a hands-on build night where everyone can make something. 

Here in Austin, Delwin Goss is someone who has been keeping political signs out of the Austin landfill for a long time.  Over the past 20 years Delwin has seen people up-cycle these signs in super creative ways: temporary shelters at the Lockhart Animal Shelter and a number of animal rescue groups, theatre stage sets, portable hunting blinds, templates for stone cutting, roof barns, chicken coops, to protect various surfaces during construction, painting even sand blasting. One bright student even used them to make waterproof outdoor furniture. Mechanics use them to work under cars. Cut into strips and stacked in the cells between wall studs for insulation.  Delwin is an enthusiastic supporter of De-Sign Day, and has offered to collect and store signs to be used at this event.  I want to thank Delwin for his support of this event and for his passion for finding people who can creatively re-use these materials.   

Austin Tinkering School 1507 Wilshire Blvd. 78722.     11am to 4pm. 

De-Sign day is meant to spread quickly from city to city. The actual goal of this project is to publish the creative ways students and families in Austin find to up-cycle signs into creative projects. In preparing for this event I am publishing a few how-to videos that cover some of the tools and techniques students are using at ACE Academy in the classroom to bring to their De-Sign up-cycling efforts.  Our hope is that sharing these tools and techniques will cause people to dream bigger when thinking about what they might make.

This first video covers using eyelets and rivets while turning the corrugation channels 90 degrees to each other. 

A successful De-Sign day event has the following ingredients: 

1) Children who want to make a new thing out of old signs.

2) Adults willing to take time to work along side of students.

3) A space to meet where hand tools can be used.

Bring a few of these tools along with you:

Pizza cutter, sharpies, wooden spatula, duck tape/double stick tape, yard stick/meter stick, tape measure, large scissors, machine screws, nuts and washers, vice grips and smallish blocks of wood to bend wire around. Anything you think would work well with Coroplast signs and wire stakes.

Specialty tools: Bring bolt cutters, eyelet punch/setters, grommet or rivet tools.