One of the amazing things for me about the process we are working through to develop the galleries for this new science centre is how much iteration is allowed for in the process. By this I mean that the exhibits, the layouts, the “design” and even the voice of the writing go through many many variations as they evolve into what you are going to see on opening day. Even then, we are trying to leave enough open ended elements so that it can continue to evolve (and so that our visitors want to come back).

I thought it might be interesting to share a quick example of how much the voice (the person you might imagine speaking what is written on panels in the gallery) for the Earth and Sky gallery has evolved. A few months ago we often described the gallery “like cutting a line from the bedrock to the aurora and being amazed by the experience of everything in between.” Some of the words associated with it were “poetic” and “beautiful.” This was a good starting point, but as we started to play that tone out something didn’t fit. The problem it turns out was that we were biasing it too much  – we are honoring our visitors if we give them space to decide what their own reactions are.  The kind of experiences we hope to cultivate in the gallery are still going to offer the possibility of noticing things that are poetic or beautiful, but we’ve tried to think of it as starting a conversation, not directing one.

As a result of this I’m now thinking of the ES graphic panels as a conversation. Imagine walking through your neighborhood (either in the city or the country) with someone you respect, and who respects you (we’ve been calling them an “elder” – like a grandparent maybe)  and having a conversation be sparked by a specific observation about the physical world. That leads to a broader “insight” (like a piece of wisdom but not too hokey) and the chance to explain more if you want. I’ll post more about this as we go, but right now I’ll leave with an example from our experiments (this may or may not end up in the final text)

-Kris

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Inspired by many different outlets, at the April Market Collective we wanted to turn an entire room into a cardboard forest.  The best part – we started with an empty room papered in cardboard and had market participants add something to transform it into the forest over two days.

We set up our supplies (broken down cardboard, a table to cut on, hot glue, masking tape, packing tape, box cutters, and scissors) in another space just outside the forest.  It was interesting to watch the reactions of people as they approached us.  A lot of people just thought the building space was it.  One guy even said, “Well, we must be bored, cutting up cardboard”.  Then we directed him into the forest room.  That’s when the impressions turned to amazement, delight, respect, and awe.

It was crazy wonderful to see how one person’s small woodland creature added so much to the overall effect. Kris also had the great idea to outfit the room with bird and forests sounds.  It became an immersive experience; many people commented they wanted this in their house or bedroom.

Check out Day 1:

-Stacey.

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A year ago I ran the “Birds On A Wire” pilot to try to get people to “play” images like a piece of music. We were looking for a pilot that gave visitors a chance to make unexpected connections between music and the world around them, to be inspired by the landscapes of Alberta, and to share what they noticed with the people around them if they want.

They were supposed to drag their fingers across photographs of Alberta landscapes to trigger sounds. This already abstract notion was made more confusing by technology (capacitive sensors under the photos) that verged on magic, poor sound quality and way too much text. During the pilot I had conversations with visitors who liked the combination of unexpected elements (landscapes and music) which encouraged me to keep the idea around until we had a chance to look at it again. As the E&S gallery moved ahead one of the topic areas that emerged focused on looking at different landscapes in the province. The “Birds On A Wire” pilot seemed like something that might work as a way of comparing different Alberta landscapes in a playful way.

The pilot for “Birds On A Wire 2” uses a touch screen monitor. The visitor gets to choose between a variety of background landscapes on top of which a visitor can collage more landscape elements (animals, trees, buildings, landscape pieces) or mark specific points on the image with musical notes. Each of these elements triggers a sound. When it is running, the program “reads” those bits they have marked or added to the image and “plays” what they have created.  The visitor can change the speed, change the background and save their composition.

A screenshot from the new version

We are still testing the new version, but already it seems promising.  Everyone who has worked with it does something different – creating their own new landscape (adding new image elements), or making music (adding notes) inspired by what is already there   It has held their attention, inspiring them to iterate by changing the backgrounds and shifting what they have already done.

So what is the measure of success for this pilot? Composing a beautiful song? Probably not. Success will be when people have a conversation with the person next to them about the music or the landscape they were looking at. As this pilot goes forward I will watch as much for what people think about the activity as for how they are using it.

-Kristofer

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Just over a year ago, Kris’s brother sent him a link to this video. Alberta landscapes have all kinds of patterns–from the rise and fall of the Rockies to fenceposts and telephone poles–so Kris was inspired to see if he could find a way to get  visitors would “play” the Albertan landscape.

V1: Trace the Landscape

Eugene (our in-house electronics genius) attached capacitive sensors to a MIDI board from a toy piano. Running your finger over the sensors played notes—the higher on the sheet the higher the note.

Kris printed out evocative pictures of Alberta and invited visitors to put them on the sensors and trace them, triggering sounds. Some visitors looked through and commented on the pictures, and some put them on the panel and touched them. But no one traced the landscapes or compared their sounds.

Maybe capacitive sensors were too mysterious for people to use for a non-intuitive activity.

V2: What if we reveal the technology? And make it sounds better?

Eugene modified the MIDI board to play a pentatonic scale (so tracing would make musical sounds) and Kris put the pictures next to the sensors (so the technology would be less hidden). He drew a hand on the sensor panel to cue people to touch it. Alas—they placed their hands on the outline instead of using a fingertip to trace.

He also tried incorporating MMMTSSS (a super-intuitive music program from the MIT Media Lab), but then pretty much everyone used MMMTSSS.

V3: What if we ditch the technology?

Kris made linocut stamps of trees, telephone poles, buildings and other features. He played music with a strong beat and encouraged people to stamp a landscape as they marched around a table covered with newsprint.

Once they got into it, they had fun with this set-up. But they either marched and stamped, or looked at the landscapes (some drew themselves into the picture), and still no one connected the sounds to the places.

Coincidentally, Kris is trying a new digital version this week–watch for his post on how it works.

–Katherine

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This was an event that was part of the Choose Yer Own Festival (Chooseyerown.com).  The festival is one of the most exciting things I’ve ever seen in Calgary because it is basically a chance for people who want to do fun, participatory things in the city to do something. What was really cool was that someone just walking by could just join in.

On saturday we held an event where 95 People Bottled the Sky.  They took water from the Bow river and dyed it with plant dyes to match the sky right now, or one they remembered and wanted to share.  Some people remembered the sky after big fires, commemorated an old love or talked about the kind of day they wanted to remember.

-Kris

A video compilation of the bottled skies

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Carly, Vlad and I were testing out a pilot we called Raindrop DJ.

Raindrops + Microphone + lots of plastic wrap + Reverb effect =

-Kris

Raindrop DJ Testing

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It took three tries but inspiration from Explora plus providing light facilitation with simple materials and a base machine to build upon and we got people iterating Chain Reaction machines!-dana

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Unrelated to pilots specifically but related to amazingly rad maker stuff in the world at large…

You’ve probably seen Ok Go’s giant Rube Goldberg video for This Too Shall Pass. Well, here they are preforming it underwater at the most recent Maker Faire in the bay area. Pretty awesome.

-dana!

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I’m a geek. I’ve always been a geek, and I’m ok with that.  I’ve discovered that one of the perils (and joys) of working at a place like a science centre is that every so often you meet yourself.  Sometimes it’s someone your own age who shares the same interests, offering the potential for new friends; and other times it feels a little like a Dickensian novel, meeting the ghost of your own geeky past.

I was piloting last night using an interesting dataset we got from one of our student connections at ISEEE. The  pilot used maps and asked people to imagine how much land area would be required to generate enough power to supply Calgary for a year if you only used one energy source (Nuclear, Solar, Wind, Coal, Natural Gas).  My ghost of Christmas past moment came when one young girl walked up to the map, took one look at the solar diagram and the wind diagram, then turned to me and with a very assured voice said “well if you want me to do this properly we are going to have to do a shadow study and check the zoning.”

It was like meeting my younger, city planning obsessed self – only with longer hair and a can-do attitude.

We worked together and talked about what sort of other information she would have wanted to actually do the activity; Dana also came by and offered some good ideas.  I think we are going to get Darran to make a simulation that would give people more feedback as they tried to make decisions about how to power their city.

-Kris

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We’ve been working on E&I pilots today. Check out the album for pictures. Dana has been trying to figure out if people can build things that capture energy from smaller movements in the environment (grass waving, leaves moving, water rippling). Looking back today I’ve gone down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to play with the idea that the way a vehicle touches the ground can affect how efficiently it can transfer the power of an engine into the movement of that vehicle.  The last series of pilots that have come out of this may have gotten a bit far from that original intention, but we will see where it can go.  The first pilots put wind up vehicles on different ground surfaces.  Then wind up cars with wheels that you could modify (better wheels = travel farter with the same amount of stored energy) but the cars we used were pretty hard to make work.  The idea then was to see if maybe the context of making snow tires (either for starting and staying on a road) or for testing how well a braking tire works (really good at transferring the forward momentum out of the car).  I’ve built a car that you can make start breaking at a given point and then see how far it will skid. This is a good example of the greatest strength and weakness of the piloting process – you can discover some really amazing things but sometimes find that a path wasn’t as rich as it seemed at first.

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