Cyber Grrrl

Cyberdecks are having a moment in the zeitgeist. The name refers to custom DIY computers—often small and aesthetic—housed in everything from lunchboxes and jewelry boxes to repurposed makeup cases and toys. They’re designed to perform specific tasks: You can surf the web or stream media, build a portable vlogging rig or distraction-free writing device, all without having your data exposed—or having to lug around a laptop. 

The first fictional “cyberspace decks” appeared in William Gibson’s 1984 dystopian novel, Neuromancer, and it’s no surprise the real thing has materialized at a moment that feels like the dark future has arrived. But cyberdecks go deeper than cute; they’re a practical way to divest from big tech monoculture and regain some digital autonomy. They’re also a rejection of homogenous design. Perhaps also unsurprisingly, women and femme makers are at the forefront of the movement.

Kate Bailey was creating cyberdecks long before they started trending on TikTok. An industrial designer and tech veteran, she spent 17 years designing hardware for Microsoft. She’s also an artist and the co-director of Actualize Artist in Residence, one of Seattle’s fastest-growing
art studio complexes.

I met Bailey one evening in June at her studio. She’d just come from her day job at Vale, a Pioneer Square-based matcha company where she’s spent the past 10 months as Head of Design, leading the development of a state-of-the-art matcha machine. Once her day is over there, she makes the short commute to Actualize, located in the historic, six-story Prefontaine Building, which, until recently, was used as commercial office space. During the pandemic, the building slowly emptied, and in 2025, Actualize leased nearly 14,000 square feet of the property. There are currently 30 artist studios in use, plus coworking spaces, and a ground-floor gallery and gift shop. This fall, they plan to take over another wing, adding more studios.

There’s something convincing and infectious about the way Bailey talks about potential and bringing ideas to life, but actualizing Actualize hasn’t been easy. The project began in 2024, when Bailey set her mind on carving out free and low-cost studio space for fellow artists—something that’s always been scarce in Seattle. Philanthropist Shari Behnke and Edie Adams joined her as co-founders, helping establish a suite of temporary studios in the Coliseum Theater building. But mere weeks after they moved in, the building was sold and the new owner declined to renew their lease. 

Bailey made lemonade. After months of scrambling to raise funds and locate a new home for her artists, she landed in the Prefontaine Building—a space that’s proved an upgrade in every sense. Today, the building is a bustling engine of activity. The energy is palpable.

Entering Bailey’s studio feels like stepping into a miniature Wonderland: Are those real seashells actually phones? Does that glass trinket box play movies? Is that chunk of rose quartz actually a phone charger? Actually, yes. The walls of the studio are lined with storage organizers filled with electrical components (Bailey harvests much of it from second-hand devices and e-waste). Glowing webs of geometrical LED light sculptures ascend toward the ceiling. The carpet is still office beige, of course. 

As we settle in, a machine over my shoulder whirs to life and begins printing a long ribbon of receipt paper. The robotic artwork, aptly titled Is It Listening?, uses a custom language model programmed by Bailey, which runs on a miniature computer connected to a hacked receipt printer. When tethered to a helium balloon, the bot floats around crowded rooms, recording snippets of overheard conversations and printing them out—a dreamy Dada poem that trails to the floor. “You don’t mind that it’s listening to us?” Bailey asks with a laugh. (I didn’t mind; it wasn’t eavesdropping to sell me something, or sell my data, after all.) 

Nearby, another piece, #FreeLuigi, hangs on the wall.It’s a shrine to Luigi Mangione that features a photo of America’s favorite vigilante (hiking Mount Olympus) next to an X-ray of the back surgery that radicalized him, and stacks of prescription pain medication bottles nested among flickering LED candles. Bailey’s hand is especially evident in the digital marquee streaming #FreeLuigi posts on X in real time. It’s not meant to glorify Mangione, but to underscore the systemic failures of a healthcare system that has pushed the masses to a collective breaking point. Bailey says she’s sold quite a few of them.

Then there’s Reality Massage, a headset that measures brainwaves and triggers a mechanized bubble blower when the wearer achieves a relaxed state. The Shell Phones are embedded with the smallest Raspberry Pi computers and microcomponents that store and playback recordings: They can whisper messages when held to the ear, or record your thoughts and whisper them back. Another recent work, Dopamine Disruptor, is inspired by pinball machines and awards one point for every second a connected smartphone goes unused. The top score is emblazoned on the device—in Bailey’s case, 1,274 seconds. “When you take your phone off, it makes this animation that’s like, Yay, look, you did it!” she explains. “It’s really necessary for me, personally.”

All of these artworks share cyberdeck DNA: hand-built computing devices assembled from single-board computers, microSD cards, sensors, and other modular components. But Bailey’s worktable is strewn with actual cyberdecks, too. 

One, a portable computer for recording video tutorials, is housed in a rugged, olive-green Pelican case.Inside is a 7-inch LCD touchscreen, speakers, and a battery-powered Raspberry Pi concealed under a layer of pink foam. The computer interfaces with a mini keyboard floating on the foam and a pink fuzzy microphone mounted on a gooseneck arm. A flurry of pink plastic cherry blossoms encircles the electronics. Next to it, a smaller cyberdeck sits inside a glass jewelbox. A screen just a few inches wide is wired to an even smaller computer and keyboard. “It’s for my bedside table, so I can put my phone across the room and still watch something as I fall asleep,” she explains.

Customization is a defining characteristic of the cyberdeck community. Girlie-pop, retro, cyberpunk, or ruggedly utilitarian: No two decks are alike. What they do share is a rejection of mass-market tech blandness. 

Bailey knows both ends of the spectrum—she spent 17 years designing monolithic, monochrome devices, after all. But working for big tech wasn’t her childhood dream job. As a kid, Bailey spent endless hours with her dad, a contractor, in his Fremont workshop. “He had me on the bandsaw at 7 years old,” she recalls. “I learned how to sew and use the bandsaw in the same year.” She credits her father for instilling a relentless sense of possibility. “He planted a seed of if you can imagine it, we can build it, we can figure it out.” 

When Bailey was a teenager, her father—ever the pragmatist—encouraged her to pursue architecture, leading her to sign up for a class at Garfield High, where Bailey was a student. “I quickly realized I didn’t want to run CAD all day,” she says, “but my teacher in that class introduced me to industrial design. I was like, ‘I’ve never heard of industrial design!’ He’s like, ‘See that computer? See the curves in the monitor? That’s referencing the curves of a woman’s hips.’ I was like… okay.”

Fortunately, the unsettling introduction didn’t turn her off; after class, she went straight to Half Price Books and pulled every book on the subject she could find. “It was an oh, my God moment, because I had always been obsessed with stuff. I spent all my free time at garage sales, every weekend at the Fremont Vintage Mall. I was just obsessed with things.”

She also quickly discovered that industrial design was a total boys club.“I realized that basically everything around us—the objects we interact with every day—had been designed by a man,” she says. “And that just isn’t going to work. That’s when I knew: I’m going to get in here and mess with this, see if I can disrupt it. Objects should not be decided by men.” She pauses. “Okay—maybe some of them, but definitely not most of them.” 

While studying at California College of the Arts in San Francisco—the epicenter of tech—Bailey landed several high-profile internships, including one with Microsoft. They encouraged her to apply for a job as soon as she graduated. “Growing up, I was so punk rock that I never would have considered working for Microsoft,” she says. “But their team was actually really cool.” Over her tenure at the company, she designed keyboards, mice, webcams, and especially tablets—she has a stack of them at home measuring over a foot tall, representing every model she worked on. When she was tapped to work on the then-secret Microsoft Surface prototype, she joined an elite team of electrical and mechanical engineers and model makers.

But she was still just a designer; she didn’t know how to program or code. It took a surgery that required three months stuck recovering on her back to finally push her toward teaching herself the basics. That opened a whole new world of possibilities: She could finally realize all the weird art projects she’d always dreamed of. “I think there’s something that happens when women get into tech,” she says. “We want to share it because it’s cool, right? It’s the opposite of a lot of guys in tech, who tend to be hoardy and gatekeepy. They make it difficult and keep it difficult. It doesn’t need to be that hard.”

Women have been at the forefront of tech since the beginning. Bailey cites Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century English mathematician and writer whose notes on Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine included what is widely considered the first published computer algorithm. 

“Lovelace was the first person to prophesize that programming would be used beyond pure computations, that they would be applied to art and music,” Bailey notes. “She envisioned how we’re using tech today.”

After years teaching herself electronics and hardware through tutorials and forums, Bailey wants to help others navigate the steep learning curve. This August, she is partnering with xispa, the new art-and-technology incubator at MadArt Studio, to offer her first cyberdeck workshop. Participants will bring an enclosure sourced from a thrift store or something they already own, and Bailey will guide them through concepting, sourcing components, building, debugging, and programming the cyberdeck’s interface. Each participant will leave with a custom computer they designed and built themselves. 

“What I love about this trend is that I don’t think this is a trend,” Bailey says. “Women and femmes getting into building custom hardware is only going to keep growing. We might not call them ‘cyberdecks’ in a few years, but custom DIY hardware is here to stay.”

In Bailey’s wonderland, it’s easy to draw the connections between things that otherwise might seem worlds apart: manifestation, tech, crystals, leases, matcha machines, turning lemons into magic. 

“The concept of customizing the world around us is one of the things I’m about in life,” she says. “With Actualize, with everything. The systems and institutions we live within were designed by somebody else. I want people to see this stuff and think: Why can’t my phone charger be a quartz crystal? I want people to zoom out, take the sense of agency something like this gives them and apply that to the rest of their lives.” 

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