About Joey

Joey Castillo is the Technologist in Residence at Cornell Tech in New York City, and a maker and purveyor of Oddly Specific Objects based out of Brooklyn. He hates speaking about himself in the third person, so the rest of this is going to switch voices.

I work across the domains of open source hardware, embedded software and the design of physical objects. The core belief that drives my practice fits in one sentence: people should understand the technologies that surround them so that they have power over that tech.

My projects tend to involve speculation on a road not taken: rewinding tech to a point in the past, imagining a present that diverges from it, and constructing an object around that premise. With Sensor Watch, I pair low-power liquid-crystal display tech of the late 1980s with a modern, low-power microcontroller to create a space for general-purpose computing inside an old Casio wristwatch. With Open Book Touch, I drive an e-paper display with a microcontroller packing the power of a 1990s-era workstation, and build software for it using a UI framework inspired by the technology of that same era.

The objects I make are open in both license and design: circuit board silkscreens carry schematic hints, engineering notes and explanatory text, such that the finished object carries with it the instructions needed to understand, reproduce or repurpose it. At a time when the most powerful tech companies in the world are shipping software that diminishes and disempowers the people who use it, I want to create objects that suggest another path.

You can follow me on Mastodon where I post occasionally, or on Instagram which, while problematic, is at least not run by an overt nazi.