Celebrating Creativity During A Pandemic

Sometimes it is hard to turn away from the "pit of despair" that seems to characterize life during the July 2020 pandemic reality in the United States.

But wait!  It is not all doom-and-gloom!  Artist Federico Tobon, of wolfCat Workshop, has used paper clips, cardboard, scraps of wood, and tape to create wonderful and whimsical little mechanical sculptures, some of which are featured in this post.

Tobon also created a video collection of some creations entitled "29 automata in 6 minutes" which you can see on YouTube or embedded below.

You probably have all the materials you need at home right now to put together your own pandemic plaything -- why not give it a whirl?

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Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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A Wonderful Resource For Creative People That Make Things That Move

In a fantastic "back to the future" moment, the fine folks at the 507movements.com website have created a wonderful resource for any maker, designer, or builder that makes things that move.

Basically, they've created a Web version of the classic technical reference Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown. (The original printed edition came out in 1868!)

As the title of both the original book and the website suggest, here are five hundred and seven drawings of mechanical movements -- from two simple gears meshing to a labyrinthine collection of intricate pulley arrangements.

The beauty of the website is that they are now animating each of the 507 drawings so you can see the mechanisms in action!

Definitely worth a look (and worth bookmarking for future reference!) so click on over to the 507movements.com website to see the entire collection!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul is an instigator, in the best sense of that word. He likes to mix up interesting people, ideas, and materials to make both individual museum exhibits and entire museums with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.)

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Walkalong Gliding with Phil Rossoni

Phil Rossoni is a commercial glider pilot who has always been interested in finding ways to share the experience of piloting an aircraft with a wide audience.  I thought his enthusiasm (and directions and videos!) for lightweight gliding aircraft that can be made with museum visitors would be a great thing to share with ExhibiTricks readers.

What's the next best thing to soaring through the skies like birds? Its called Walkalong Gliding where a simple paper airplane seems to hover in perpetual motion on the edge of a piece of cardboard. 

Walkalong Gliding works on the same principles of soaring flight used by all manner of flying creatures to effortlessly take to the skies. The best design for the indoor museum setting is the Tumblewing designed by John Collins aka "The Paper Airplane Guy". 

Everybody gets to build and fly their own glider made from a 1"X4" strip of light newsprint. What's the goal? Keep it flying for at least 30 seconds, longer than the current world record for a tossed paper airplane! It's called the "30 second airborne club". 

Like the first pioneers of flight had to learn, staying in the air for extended periods requires control of the paper airplane. What's the takeaway? Yes try this at home, come back and show everyone you've learned the right stuff! 

To find out more about making lightweight gliding aircraft for yourself or with your museum visitors, check out Phil's book,  Build and Pilot Your Own Walkalong Gliders and his list of Tumblewing Links.

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Tinkering and Building Things: An Interview with Clifford Wagner

Clifford Wagner started his Science Center career in 1980, and since then has created interactive exhibit components and traveling exhibitions for countless museum visitors.  Over 35 years later,  he still loves trying to come up with great visitor experiences.

I was delighted that Clifford took the time to share his thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers in the interview below:

What’s your educational background?  I’ve got a Degree in Art and Design.  But you could say my education started with my mother being a teacher and my father an engineer.  She always encouraged creativity. My father passed along a lot of his knowledge to me with the tinkering and building things in the basement we did together. 

What got you interested in Museums?  Truth to tell, I stumbled into it.  I did a couple of years of custom furniture making.  Then in 1980 I got hired as a cabinetmaker at the Franklin Institute Science Museum.  Immediately I was building hands on interactive exhibits and that is what I have been doing ever since. I was the chief interactive device designer/prototyper when I left the Franklin eleven years later, to jump across the street to Please Touch Museum for Children as Director of Exhibits.  The Science museum work focused me on creating the best possible interactive experiences for our visitors.  The children’s museum work got me to be more playful. 

How does actually building your own exhibits inform your design process?  I make my own mechanisms and cabinetry, so I have a good idea of what is workable.  This hands-on knowledge informs my design process at every stage.  Whether I’m working on my own projects or with another museum or science center, the process starts with brainstorming.   At the beginning,  don’t rule something out because it seems impossible to achieve.  Who knows? It might be doable. One of my favorite lines I use in brainstorming is “And the luxury version of this device would be….” Quite often  the final, doable device can incorporate much from the pie in the sky version.

When I design and build interactives I pay very close attention to where our eyes go when we are looking at something for the first time.  An interactive can be confusing to visitors if the sequence isn’t logical.  I’ve seen text, just six inches away from where it should be. Because it is not in an intuitive place, for the visitor it might just as well be on the other side of the moon. I do this eyetracking as a mental process but now eyetracking hardware can be had for as little as $500.  I can’t endorse this because I haven’t used it, but it does exist.

Tell us a little bit about your current thinking about traveling exhibitions?  When we make  a traveling exhibit we must ensure that visitors are going to have a meaningful response to it, whether that response is humor or emotion or pure delight or relevancy to their lives. Every component that makes it into my traveling exhibits is there because it has a high probability of the visitor reacting to it by pulling over their friends  “Come here, you’ve got to see this!” Are your exhibits doing that? If not, tweak them until they do.

What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?   Museum conferences are great. This is when all of our virtual colleagues turn real. Go and talk to everyone doing the same sort of work you are doing.  Do not be shy. For me there is nothing more valuable than being at a host city museum with other people whose lives are creating exhibits and being able to ask them: what do they think? What do they think of the exhibit that you both are standing in front of? Ask, talk, listen, learn and teach.

What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing more variety into their exhibitions?    Museum professionals have a lot to learn from each other. Science Centers can learn a lot about playfulness from Children’s Museums. Children’s museums can learn how to engage adults as well as kids. Art Museums can enhance visitor experiences by having more hands-on devices. For variety from a purely design point of view, a good interactive has both hooking and holding power. It has to attract the visitor’s attention, and then keep that attention. One way to get variety into an exhibition is to have as many different kinds of hooks as possible. An unexpected way to control the action. A mirror so people can see their own faces. A sign with an interesting question.

What do you think is the “next frontier” for traveling exhibitions?  Science Centers have been exploring timely and relevant topics for quite a while, since pioneering exhibits such as Darkened Waters about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. When we produce an exhibit we are asking for our visitors' time and attention.  Are our exhibits worthy of their attention?  Are we putting all this time and energy into illuminating things that inspire visitors and help our civilization continue to flourish? Children’s museums have to make sure that any traveling exhibition they bring in works for the adults as much as the kids.  Adults are 50% of your audience.  Giving adults good stuff will make them want to come back.

What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?   I love the extraordinary playfulness of the City Museum in St. Louis. I also love the questions raised by the exhibit and book called Massive Change by Bruce Mau.  How is this for an opening statement in an exhibition:  “Whether we realize it or not, we live in a designed world. The question is: will this be a design for destruction or for a sustainable new world that we can safely hand down to our children and our children’s children?”   How’s that for relevancy?

Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?  Earlier this year,  I built five interactives  for The Discovery Museum and Planetarium in Bridgeport, Connecticut based on The Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement (Project APE) exhibit book produced by the Exploratorium.  A couple of them I built much as described in the book with minor improvements, others like the Thermal Camera exhibit I redesigned and added on to provide more opportunity for visitor engagement.  

I was happy to give The Discovery Museum an extra device I developed  for the thermal camera.  It is a 4 pane rotatable window. Two of the panes are clear to our eyes but opaque to the thermal camera and two are clear to the camera but opaque to our eyes. It is so cool to see visitors react to this counterintuitive effect showing the camera seeing what we can’t.  That’s the hook in this - the unexpected- and it’s a really good hook.     

I’m also building theatrical props, including some that are on tour with Cirque du Soleil.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?  I’d love to put together a team to make an exhibit that helps people really think about their place in the world and how we can help achieve sustainable well being for all people and for the planet.  I sincerely believe we have the knowledge to do so.  It wouldn’t be an easy exhibit to create—it’s a tough topic.  But I can’t imagine anything more important.

For me, the most important question of all is  How are you helping?  How are you helping all of us have quality lives?  For us working in museums, the way we help is to make things that enrich our visitors’ lives. We help visitors understand science phenomena, we make creative spaces where kids  play and grow.  The work we do is so important.  So thank you all for what you do. 

To find out more about Clifford Wagner and his exhibit work, click on over to his website!

Speaking of Clifford's exhibit work, he will soon be retiring some of his most popular and visitor-tested traveling exhibitions after very successful tours --- but he would like to find good homes for all those exhibit components!  So if your museum is in the market for some top-notch exhibit components (or entire exhibitions!) at incredible prices, check out these PDFs featuring exhibit descriptions, images and prices for Garden of Gizmos, Color Play, and Contraptions A to Z.  These exhibitions are well built and in great shape, so much so that Clifford is providing a full one year warranty on every exhibit component purchased.

As a BONUS to ExhibiTricks readers, if you purchase any components from the traveling exhibitions mentioned above before May 30, 2016 and mention "ExhibiTricks" you'll get a 5% discount! 

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Making Your Ideas Real: The Art Of Tinkering

The crazy winter weather where I live on Long Island has not been very conducive to the sorts of slightly frenetic spurts of creativity that I love.  The whole world seems encased in ice and snow and one gets the feeling of being both trapped and sluggish.

So I couldn't have asked for better timing for the arrival of the new(ish) book called "The Art of Tinkering" the other day.

The Art of Tinkering is billed as a way to "meet 150+ makers at the intersection of art, science & technology."  It's a colorful book bursting with photos, ideas, and even simple DIY projects.  The cover of the book (shown above) is printed with conductive ink --- so you can even experiment with and hack your copy!

Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich, the folks who spearheaded The Tinkering Studio at The Exploratorium, have put together a fantastic book that captures the spirit of The Tinkering Studio while also giving you a sense of the inspirations and working styles of the makers featured inside.

Here's one of my favorite suggestions from inside the book:  Put yourself in messy, noisy & sometimes dangerous situations!

But enough talk --- grab a copy of The Art of Tinkering and warm up your own creative impulses! 




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ASTC 2013 Takeaways. Making Good (not "Breaking Bad") in Albuquerque.

The annual gathering of the international clan of Science Center professionals descended on the beautiful desert locale of Albuquerque, New Mexico last week.

While the sessions and presentations during the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) conference (and in the hallways, bars, and exhibition hall!) were eclectic and varied, there did seem to be clusters of topics that kept popping up.

And chief among those topic clusters was the whole Make/Maker Making/Tinkering "movement."  There were several sessions that dove into both celebrations and concerns about how, or whether, to bring a Maker Space to your museum. 

One session that I was part of entitled "Is There Science in a Maker Event?" chaired by perennial gadfly Hooley McLaughlin of the Ontario Science Center raised issues of content over process that were ably countered by two thoughtful Making/Tinkering advocates in Karen Wilkenson from the Exploratorium and Lisa Brahms from the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.  There was lively interaction with the audience, but ultimately no firm resolutions (other than suggesting that Hooley needs to visit some more Maker Spaces!)  Other Make-minded sessions explored whether the Maker "buzz" was just a fad, as well as the best ways to work with local communities to create Make spaces and events.

Personally, I find the whole Maker movement an exciting opportunity for museums if pursued with strong community input and realistic expectations about internal logistics (As two simple examples: YES, Maker Spaces should be staffed!  NO, Maker Spaces aren't just a place for a bunch of 3D printers!)

Speaking of 3D printers, there were several vendors in the Exhibit Hall, and several museum colleagues as well who were talking about ways to use 3D printed versions of natural history objects (including scaled-up models of microorganisms!) in really interesting ways.  I'm working on a Discovery Room project that could really benefit from that.

Lastly, another place where I think the Maker/Museum intersection is really going to explode (aside from the current Children's Museum and Science Center booms) is inside History Museums.  If there was ever a place to tie together the making process with actual "made" products, in context, History Museums are it!




Another big thread throughout ASTC 2013 was thinking more carefully and critically about engaging various communities, from the early stages of the process, in our museum work.

Rather than replay all the sessions regarding community engagement, I'll share three links to resources worth checking out in this regard:

Sparticl is an online resource building a community to share the best science resources.  Sparticl has been designed primarily for teens, but it's really a great resource for everyone --- providing access to the best science on the web, curated by experts.

An excellent session about European collaborations between museums and community groups and governmental organizations introduced me to the PLACES project.  Check out their website to see the wide-range of ways that museums are finding to create cities of scientific culture.

Another great online community (which I'll be writing a more-detailed post about soon) comes from CAISE (Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education) in the form of the Web portal called informalscience.org, which is sort of the "one stop shop" for STEM information, evaluation reports, and resources.


In a way, I'm still digesting all the thoughts and conversations from Albuquerque, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that ASTC 2014 will be in Raleigh, North Carolina from October 18 through 21, 2014, and that session proposals for the Raleigh conference are due this November 15th, 2013.

You can check out the ASTC website for more info, and I hope to see you there!


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