Welcome to PLIX (In)visible Self! What technologies and techniques can we use to build our inward-looking senses and enhance everyday skills for personal growth?
🥰 Ages 8+ 🕐 1–1.5 Hours 👩👧👦 up to 12 Participants 🍎 1–2 Facilitators 🎨 Craft Materials
This activity centers around building and speculating tools for revealing invisible parts of ourselves: our breath, our heartbeat, and other body rhythms. Here, “tools” means anything from simple electronics sensors to programmed circuits to mechanically activated paper constructions!
Workshop Prompts & Gallery

Prompts from PLIX
PLIX Community Remixes
PLIX Community Book Connections
Materials
Supply Kit
Zine
Download here ↓
Remixable zine ↓
Facilitation
Playtest and Plan
Remember: There’s no one right way to prepare for a workshop. Use these steps as a loose guideline for planning to run this activity.
- Choose one of our prompts, or come up with a prompt that suits your library community. Our activity guides are for getting you started—feel free to change or create new design elements to suit your local community! All PLIX activity guides are designed for a minimum of 1–2 facilitators
- Gather materials and print out the zine.
- Make an example project. Try it out with friends and colleagues. Thoughtfully incomplete, good examples feature a variety of approaches and starting points. Use them to inspire learners to make something uniquely their own. Guide to Making Activity Examples →
- Try the activity with your patrons. Set a date and time. Easily promote your workshop with our editable (In)visible Self flyer template →
- Populate your workshop space with diverse example projects. Create and play together!
- Reflect on what you’ve done and consider doing a remix!
Facilitation Tips
By design, this activity invites learners of all backgrounds to play with form and function. It is a very new set of tools and materials for most people, so make sure that there is enough material to accommodate participants as they get used to the new craft. When facilitating this activity, we encourage you to support a tinkering mindset.
About PLIX (In)visible Self
This activity was developed in collaboration with Media Lab graduate student Caitlin Morris, whose work focuses on developing new ways to understand how we can control our physical and emotional states.
Other ways to engage with the PLIX Inflatables program:
- Looking for some background music? Check out our PLIX (In)visible Self Playlist 🎶
- Questions? Ask them on the PLIX Discussion Forum 🙋♀️
- Share your experience running this activity on Twitter or Instagram and tag us @heyplix