Grandma Was a Box Before It Was an App

What I remember is being at Riga Technical University in Ķīpsala and working on a physical device for a grandmother. Not a metaphorical grandmother, not a persona living inside a slide deck, but the very practical problem of pills: how can an older person, or someone living with a chronic illness, take the right medication at the right time without the whole thing becoming another confusing digital system?

The official Garage48 record gives the project a different name from the one that survived in my head and on GitHub. Publicly it was Digital AID, described as a portable medical box for elderly people and people with long-term illness, connected to an app and synchronized with the timetable given by doctors' prescriptions. In my repository it is simply Grandma.

I built the web part. Garage48's team list actually says this plainly: “Kris – web Development.” I like that the old record is so unceremonious. Years later, when memory starts combining rooms and years and project names, one small line can suddenly restore the structure of a weekend.

The code restores another part. The Grandma repository contains a Meteor client and a separate API. There are views for the home screen, a feed and an “imok” state. There was a MongoDB project and a Slack workspace created during the weekend. This was not an idea that only existed in a pitch. There was a digital system being built alongside a physical one.

And this is where the project becomes interesting to me again now. A pill reminder could easily have been just an app. We already had phones in our pockets. Notifications already existed. But medication is not only information. It is physical. A pill exists somewhere. A person has to reach for it, know whether it has already been taken, trust the instruction, and perhaps allow somebody else to understand whether everything is okay.

The box gave the interface a body. The software gave the box context. Neither side was enough alone.

Hardware hackathons force this kind of honesty. In software it is possible to move a problem around the screen for quite a long time. In a workshop, eventually the lid does not close. The motor does not move. The sensor gives the wrong value. The API expects something the object cannot provide. Suddenly design, code, electronics and mechanics are not departments. They are one conversation happening around the same stubborn thing.

That is the part of the old 2017 article that was worth keeping. I had written about the room itself as a kind of operating system. The dates were wrong for my participation, but the observation still feels right for 2018. RTU Design Factory was not just where the hackathon happened. The tools, components, mentors, deadlines, food, tables and people from different disciplines created temporary infrastructure for making things together.

A good collaborative environment does something subtle: it reduces the amount of courage required to cross a boundary. A web developer can ask the electronics person what the device can actually report. A designer can touch the mechanism instead of imagining it. Somebody can cut a piece of material, show the failure, and suddenly six people understand the same problem.

I think about this more now because so much making has moved back into screens, and increasingly into conversations with AI. We can produce enormous amounts of software without another human being physically near us. That is powerful. But there is something we should not lose from rooms like Garage48: the shared object that refuses to flatter us.

Grandma had to exist outside the interface. Somebody had to put medicine into it. Somebody had to understand what it was telling them. The web layer I built had to belong to a larger system with a human being at the center, a person whose health and dignity mattered more than whether our demo looked clever on Sunday evening.

Perhaps this is also why correcting the archive matters. Personal history becomes infrastructure too. If I tell myself I was in Riga in 2017 when I was actually in Tallinn building World Cleanup Day, then two different kinds of work collapse into one blurry story. One was about a global civic movement becoming an interface. The other was about a physical object helping one person manage something intimate and repetitive in daily life.

Both are much more useful when they remain themselves.