Workshop
Designing for Exploration – a collaboration with Stanford University
“Design for Exploration” is a Stanford University course taught in collaboration with the Exploratorium as part of what is hoped to be an ongoing partnership between the two institutions. Stanford professor John Edmark and I have worked with 15 students for the past 10 weeks, introducing them to concepts of inquiry-based science teaching, designing for interactivity, and rapid prototyping. Informed by a constrained palette of materials, and modeling their work on art pieces as well as science exhibits, students found inspiration for prototyping new projects and evolved them through many iterations.
Here are some examples of initial light explorations . Read more at the DfE blog
Mixing Color Crank
From Claire Rosenbaum: In brainstorming for this piece, I watched an Eames video entitled “The Solar Do-Nothing Machine”. Link (note: poor visual resolution. Not original musical score) An aspect of the video depicts shapes which seem to be bobbing in an elliptical pattern because they are rotating form a crankshaft while having their center of gravity suspended from a string. I wanted to make a piece with the same “bubbly” feel.
During the ideation, I realized the rotating shapes do not need to be opaque, but could rather be light gels that overlap to transmit new colors.
From Jimmy Chion: My light piece was inspired by a attaching a piece of dichroic to a string and dangling it in front of sunlight. Besides being blinded every one in a while, the sunlight reflected off the dichroic was as focused as the sun itself and created a laser-like beam that changed colors depending on the angle it was reflecting at. Spinning the dichroic piece fast enough, I was able to get a laser show in my room. The interesting part was that the spectrum is created was only half the spectrum (i.e. the colors between the two complementary dichroic colors). The light that did pass through the dichroic lens created a expanding and contracting ellipse on the wall that continually changed colors but remained in the same place.
CellStructure Light
From Abby Sturges:
In one of the Exploratorium exhibits, I was inspired by the bent reflective surfaces and the way they concentrated light. While playing around with a different concept, I had spray mounted some silver Mylar to a bendable strip of foam core. I stumbled upoun an interesting reflection from the way the spray mount was shown on the thin Mylar. The result is a reflection resembling a “cell structure”. To me, it looked like a snake skin. I was entranced with moving the bendable strip of Mylar to make it look like a growing and shrinking snake.
From this exploration I wanted to create a series of movable reflective strips that users could interact with. Originally, I was playing with these reflections on the ceiling and walls. Not knowing what setting I would present the concept in, I decided to mount the strips on rods and have them project onto a white foam core board. I thought mounting the reflective strips on a rod with an adjustable angle would allow the user to really manipulate the strips by their ends.
Issues
What I learned was that mounting the strips on rods discouraged people from really handling the strips. People were much too gentle with the strips and missed out on some of the intended exploration. Plus, having to project onto a white board limited the reflection scale and effect. Additionally, all strip shapes is a bit dull and could be expanded upon.
Next Steps
I am pleased with people’s interest in the reflections and their reactions to connecting the reflections to cells or biology. There were some good points that were brought up last class. What other shapes could be formed that build on the concept of cell structure? What if the scale was much larger? What else can I relate this reflection to?
I plan to explore further based on this feedback. My original intention was always to have the reflections larger scale and projecting on the ceiling. I definitely plan to get rid of the mounted posts to allow more interaction with the reflections. First, I would like to explore other shapes. Then I plan to explore the incorporation of related cell structure things…and feedback is welcome!
Marble Machines – training with the Explainers
As has become a sort of yearly tradition, we hosted a three-hour training with the new batch of Field Trip Explainers, who will be starting to work on the museum floor in a couple of weeks. This is a particularly fun and creative group to work with: their ideas are always clever, the mood happy, and the insights that transpire in the “debriefing” session afterward always worth listening to and taking note of.
Click on the image below to be taken to a gallery of their work and creations:
And here’s a sweet video of their wonderful contraptions:
Exploring reflections: a workshop
Inspired by the awesome Reflections show that is now on display at the Exploratorium, the Learning Studio offered a 3-hour workshop in which visitors built their own “Shiny, Sparkly, Something-or-Others”, as the title said.
This constituted an experiment for us in several ways, and a good first step into the kind of activities and interactions that we would like to start offering in the future.
First of all, it happened in parallel with a current show on the museum floor, and that alone allowed for adjacencies that were a source of inspiration for us, in developing the activity, and hopefully for the participants to the workshop, in coming up with their own creative ideas.
We also combined the workshop with an unusual two-week residency for artist Chris Bell, who had collaborated with us before. We thought he would be a great source of inspiration because of his previous work with lights and reflections off of common household objects, and proposed to him that he would be building and experimenting with an installation on the museum floor, right next to a gallery showcasing similar work by participants to our own workshop. Graciously, and it take a particularly selfless and generous artist to allow this, he accepted, and a great collaborations resulted once again.
So, this workshop started in the Learning Studio with a brief introduction to what we were going to do: essentially explore some of the aesthetic qualities of lights and reflections, and create our own expression of that.
Then we led the group onto the museum floor to have a chat with Chris, while he was starting to work on his installation. This was a great moment in which Chris introduced himself and his work as an artist, and had some very insightful words on his process of creation with such an ethereal medium, with a particular emphasis on knowing “when to stop”, which I think had a great and positive influence on the visitors’ work.
Then it was time to head back to the LS for an initial exploration, using just a light source and a simple sheet of Mylar, in order to start generating ideas, and to familiarize ourselves with what was possible and beautiful with this medium. After a while, we introduced, as usual, a host of different materials, all somehow reflective or translucent, as well as construction materials, wood, tape, motors, switches, etc.
The mood became very quiet and meditative, and the visitors got to work, and soon different avenues of thought took shape. I found it very interesting that often similar initial explorations led to very different end results. Likewise, as is often the case with our activities, the participants ranged both in age (from about 12 to older adults) and gender, and all seemed to be equally engaged in the activity.
Ideas were tried and discarded, problems were solved, and slowly each participant got to the point were they were satisfied with what they had built. At this point we took their creations, which were on independent “shelves”, and took them on the museum floor, where they became part of a collective Wall of Light, which stood on display for all museum visitors to see and appreciate for an amazing full two weeks.
And that concluded the first part of our exploration with light and with different kinds of interactions with the public. In the next days I will talk more about our next steps, which led to some interesting events!
Click on the image for a more complete photo gallery of the workshop.
Chain reaction videos: explainer style!
As promised, here are two videos showing the contraptions built by the explainers during their training with us. Cool stuff!
Chain Reaction training
In preparation for the upcoming Maker Faire booth, in which we will be hosting a community-built chain reaction event, we had the pleasure of trying out the activity with the Exploratorium explainers. Due to their busy schedule and the need to have the museum floor staffed, we had to split the workshop in two days, with half the explainers doing the activity on one day, and the other half on the next.
In this activity, we will ask participants to build a section of a collective chain reaction; each section will then join with and trigger the next one, so that at the end of a building session, we will be able to set the contraption off at one end, and it will work its way (flawlessly, I’m sure!) to the end.
As always, the depth of thought and care that this group of educators brings to any activity they participate in shined through, both in the actual construction of the chain reaction elements, and in the discussion we had afterwards.
Now we are definitely looking forward to Maker Faire in a month!
Here are some photographs from both days:
