Simone Giertz is best known as the creator of too many terrible robots to name — and we mean that as a compliment. The oddball niche has turned the 27-year-old Giertz into a YouTube superstar, with 1.3 million subscribers and a total of 65 million video views. “I think people just like seeing failure,” Giertz told Digital Trends a couple years back, describing the unlikely success of her crappy contraptions.
Failure isn’t a word we’d associate with Giertz’s latest project, however. Her first venture into crowdfunding, Giertz’s “Every Day Calendar” launched on Kickstarter this week, and has already smashed its funding target by more than 10 times. In doing so, it has racked up upward of $250,000 with its promise of inspiring people to obtain their goals.
As with a lot of the projects which capture the public’s imagination on Kickstarter, the Every Day Calendar has a simple premise. It’s essentially a big printed circuit board which uses capacitive touch and LEDs to light up the individual days as you achieve your goal. For instance, if your goal is to go for a jog every day or eat five portions of fruit and vegetables each day, you tap the date as you complete the task and illuminate that section of the calendar. The idea is that this kind of visual reward system will make you more likely to stick to your goal, particularly as the year goes on and you don’t want to ruin your winning streak.
“Hang the Every Day Calendar in your home, office, workshop, cavern, laboratory, castle, barn or boat,” Giertz writes on the Kickstarter page. “Just make sure that it’s someplace where you see it every day. The Every Day Calendar is 0 percent internet connected, so no apps, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or computer programs are needed to set it up. Just plug it into the wall and you’re ready to go.”
As ever, we should point out the inherent risks in crowdfunding campaigns, which don’t always ship in a timely fashion, in the state that has been promised or, sometimes, at all. Giertz’s Every Day Calendar also has something of a long lead time, since she’s not promising to deliver it until December 2019. Nonetheless, if you’re keen to get involved, head over to the Kickstarter project page, where you can pledge your cold, hard cash. Prices start at $300, although an extra $50 will also get you a T-shirt, photo, and “fancy enamel pin.”
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