First slowly, something off in the distance, then very fast it was on us: COVID-19.

When Fab@CIC and District Hall and Cambridge Hackspace closed their doors, under the mandated quarantine, you join a number of local Slack- and Zoom-powered maker COVID groups. 

But without any sewing skills, or access to a sewing machine, you can't help the mask cause. And monkeying around with an open source ventilator was out of your league. 

You keep your eyes open for an opportunity to help, but in the meantime you shift your explorations to a humbler "information pain" challenge: "touchless."

Interactivity without any risk of infection. 

Fortunately you already had some experience with touchless gesture sensors -- which you used to trigger the gachapon machines.

But a few of your projects use capacitive touch as the user interface. Those are gone. No one wants to touch anything they don't have to. 

So your first task is to go completely touchless: which means gesture sensors, and a few technologies you are eager to try: PIR (for Passive InfaRed) proximity sensors, Time of Flight (ToF) sensors, and Ultrasonic sensors.

From now on, no touching! 

And oh yeah, it's probably time to revisit what exactly "placemaking" is.