The Nest is the garage makerspace of Okada Design. It focuses on:
A bit about me
Hi I'm Corinne Takara. I am a San Jose Area artist/STEAM educator who creates playful workshops that celebrate culture and creativity to empower community voices in conversations centered on identity, science and technology. My father introduced me to biomaking through culture via hands-on explorations and storytelling with indigenous plants on Maui, Hawaii. That deep engagement with biology instilled in me a passion for connecting to biology through creative making as I develop activities in my garage makerspace/biolab.
As a child, my bedtime stories swirled with my dad’s tales of his childhood on the Lower Paia Maui sugar cane plantation. One of his earliest memories was pushing a stool up against the kitchen sink so he could reach up and poke at the Bull Durham tobacco bag tied around the faucet. It was bulging with dirt, leaves, and insects which it had collected. When he poked at it, the insect legs sticking out would quiver. When he was caught in this activity, his mom or grandma would empty the small canvas bag into the trash and retie it onto the faucet and he would excitedly wait for it to fill again.
The fact that my dad had open trench water coming into his home kitchen faucet struck me as sad, even as a child. Today, our agricultural workers often face similar situations in fieldworker communities where people drink soda instead of water as it is safer and cheaper. California fieldworkers are deeply impacted by pesticides, and carcinogenic fire smoke exposure, just as my fieldworking relatives were during the Hawaii plantation era of slash and burn practices of sugar cane harvesting. These stories drive me to imagine accessible biodesign workshops that expand access to discussions of the future of community serving biotechnology.
- design challenges that celebrate process and foster explorations of nature through a range of natural materials
- connecting teens to their local environments and to science through their existing cultural knowledge
- conversations blending design, biology, and engineering
- traditional cultural materials, modern materials, and indigenous cultural technologies for innovation inspiration
A bit about me
Hi I'm Corinne Takara. I am a San Jose Area artist/STEAM educator who creates playful workshops that celebrate culture and creativity to empower community voices in conversations centered on identity, science and technology. My father introduced me to biomaking through culture via hands-on explorations and storytelling with indigenous plants on Maui, Hawaii. That deep engagement with biology instilled in me a passion for connecting to biology through creative making as I develop activities in my garage makerspace/biolab.
As a child, my bedtime stories swirled with my dad’s tales of his childhood on the Lower Paia Maui sugar cane plantation. One of his earliest memories was pushing a stool up against the kitchen sink so he could reach up and poke at the Bull Durham tobacco bag tied around the faucet. It was bulging with dirt, leaves, and insects which it had collected. When he poked at it, the insect legs sticking out would quiver. When he was caught in this activity, his mom or grandma would empty the small canvas bag into the trash and retie it onto the faucet and he would excitedly wait for it to fill again.
The fact that my dad had open trench water coming into his home kitchen faucet struck me as sad, even as a child. Today, our agricultural workers often face similar situations in fieldworker communities where people drink soda instead of water as it is safer and cheaper. California fieldworkers are deeply impacted by pesticides, and carcinogenic fire smoke exposure, just as my fieldworking relatives were during the Hawaii plantation era of slash and burn practices of sugar cane harvesting. These stories drive me to imagine accessible biodesign workshops that expand access to discussions of the future of community serving biotechnology.
For over 15 years I have developed STEAM programs for K-12 students in East San Jose with AYA. More recently, I have created biomaking community programming through Xinampa in Salinas, California. In the summer of 2020, addressing both COVID19 and fires, I led the Xinampa Essential Ag Worker PPE Initiative. I am a co-founded of BioJam a Stanford Department of Bioengineering pilot program that engages teens in bioengineering and biomaterial design as pathways for them to share their learning in their home communities. I have led two Biodesign Challenge teams and was honored at the 2019 Biodesign Challenge Summit with the Outstanding Instructor Award. I am a 2020 Global Community Bio Summit Fellow and a Public Interest Technology Community Innovation Fellow representing Xinampa in a public forum collaboration, Bio + Food + Tech, with the Tech Interactive. I have conducted sustainability design and biomaterial design workshops in Georgia, Hawaii, Los Angeles and the greater San Francisco Bay Area.
