This session offers a comprehensive retrospective of the "NAMES Making & Tinkering Workroom - Summer 2025", exploring both its pedagogical structure and its creative outcomes. Participants will go behind the scenes of the workroom to discover how the program was designed to foster innovation within a diverse, multicultural community.

We will examine how working across cultures does not merely add variety, but actively influences the "branching out" of new ideas. By using the cultural context as a unique lens, we explore how to reread and reimagine the visual representations that surround us, turning heritage and local identity into catalysts for modern tinkering.

A central focus of the session will be the use of patterns, tiling, and tessellations as universal entry points for multidisciplinary discovery. We will demonstrate how these geometric foundations served as a bridge to discuss mathematics, biology, and history, ultimately leading to the creation of entirely new tinkering activities.

Join us to explore how culture and geometry converge to create a rich, inclusive, and sustainable framework for the future of making and tinkering in the NAMES region.