Dr. Andrew Quitmeyer (@hikinghack) is a hacker-adventurer studying interactions between wild animals and computational devices. He left his job as a tenure-track professor at the National University of Singapore to start his own field-station makerspace in Gamboa, Panama. At Digital Naturalism Laboratories (the Institute for Interactive Jungle Crafts) he blends biological fieldwork and technological crafting with a community of local and international scientists, artists, engineers, and animal rehabilitators.
Quitmeyer runs mobile workshops called “Hiking Hacks” in which participants develop interactive technologies in outdoor field sites. The Digital Naturalism Conference is his research’s largest event, bringing together over 100 participants annually from all fields to collaborate on finding new ways of interacting with nature. All of the work is published openly for sharing and remixing. Quitmeyer and his research were also the subject of a (silly) television series called “Hacking the Wild,” distributed by Discovery Networks. [Website]
