Hackable Cat Toys: What Open Projects Can Learn from Designing for Cats

Most open hardware projects begin with a technical challenge.

Reelin began with cats.

Inspired by the mechanics of a fishing rod, Reelin is a fully mechanical, open-source cat toy designed around a deceptively difficult engineering problem: how do you build something that survives the relentless curiosity of one of nature's most discerning predators, repeated impacts, and unpredictable forces?

Designing for cats turns out to be an excellent lesson in designing for people.

Building for them forced us to borrow principles from real-world engineering: designing for durability instead of disposability, and repair instead of replacement.

This talk follows the journey of taking Reelin from an engineering challenge to an open-source product. We aim to explore why repairability is a feature; why physical products deserve the same collaborative ecosystem that has transformed software; and how designing products to be understood, repaired, and remixed creates longer-lived objects and stronger communities.

1. Why designing for unpredictable users leads to better products.

2. Making hardware hackable without making it fragile.

3. Designing products that people can repair, modify and remix.

4. Lessons from releasing a consumer product as an open project.

5. Building communities around hardware instead of customers around products.