This weekend I was helping people make Toy Mash-ups at Market Collective when a girl named Georgia* came in. She was pretty stoked about the activity and as picked her toy parts she asked what we had to put them together.

I slid the big hot glue gun away from her as I gave her a low temp glue gun and explained how to use it.  She cut me off and said, “I already know how to use a hot glue gun. I learned at the science centre.”

Amazing! We almost never get to hear this part of the story–how confident and skilled people feel *after* a visit. With bells going off in my head I told her, that may be the very glue gun you learned with at the science centre. We’re from the science centre. She then took a closer look at the table and pointed out where we’d collected each material from Open Studio at the science centre. The wires and capacitors from “the place where you take apart electronics.” The buttons and sequins “from the place where you make stuff with glue.”

She didn’t use our fancy exhibit names, but she was carrying around a model of Open Studio in her mind–and a vision of herself as someone who definitely doesn’t need to be told how to use a hot glue gun.

*Yo Georgia, sorry if you read this and are embarrassed. But you are quite rad. Will you please think about volunteering with us when you are old enough?
-dana

Thanks to Ziff for help with this (and many) blog posts.

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My iPhone recently alerted me that I have filled it’s photo taking capacity to the brim, which means I had to upload a bunch of photos to my computer.  This is awesome, because I have tons of photos from the “recent past” to share.  Going through the photo stream brought to focus how much has happened in the past few months!  We’ve been all over the place getting ready for opening day.  I will review the phone highlights now, and go into depth with some of these events later this week. 

The team has kept busy on the weekends down at Market Collective.  For our April event we invited market goers to build a cardboard forest and for the May event we asked people about their favourite places in Calgary and within Alberta.

If you helped us with this project, you're awesome! Also click to see larger image.

If you click to enlarge this image, you can see that someone annotated one of their favourite places in Alberta to be the home of a cool cat. I support cool cat spotting!

Later in May we were exhibitors’ at Calgary’s International Children’s Festival!   You can read up on what we were up to here. 

In spite of the rain, Children's Fest is the best! Great theatre festival for all ages! My favourite show this year was Circus Incognitus. So wonderful and whimsical!

We continued with in-house fabrication of programming materials including electricity blocks, shadow puppet screens, and marble machines. 

Jeff and I sanding down blocks to be used for an electricity program. And Mr. Bill working hard on project construction. Any opportunity to work in the shop makes me the happiest person ever.

 A team of us has emptied out our programming supplies from all over the building and our external warehouse, all into one centralized area in the former WowTown.  These before and after shots should give you an idea of all the materials we currently have in house. 

WowTown is the former 'Iceberg Room' turning Titanic. It is huge. It is now filled with every programming material we've ever owned. We're working on getting it organized. It's like a more pleasant episode of Hoarders.

This is essentially the accumulation of 44 years of materials all in one room. We've tossed and recycled a lot of thngs we will never use, but we are still getting ready for our move. More on this later!

We found some weird things while cleaning up. Like several relic floppy disks and a sassy 'Grandma' calendar...

Offsite visits in July!  Katherine, myself and Lia Rogers from Dorkbot Calgary went to check out the Open Studio Day for the R.I.P. Workshop in Banff. 

We’ve had several meetings an entire Content Team to discuss and map out our deliverables and align our priorities for opening day.  All employee training has kicked off  as well.   We meet every Tuesday and Thursday so that upon completion, every member of staff from finance, house keeping, programs etc., will have the skills that they need to be a facilitator at the New Science Centre!  Training has been a blast!   

Photos of organizational meetings, which are essential at this point. And the middle right hand photo is from a training session where we re-created the colour of a memorable sky in our lives.

Also  – super exciting news –  last week the exhibits for Open Studio have arrived to two weeks ago to the New Science Centre Site!  Installation has commenced! 

These are not my iPhone photos. But I still felt the need to share them!

We’re going to get even busier now, so we try to squeeze fun in whenever we can!  Even if it’s jumping rope in the hallway.  

Dana jumping rope!

Stay tuned.  A lot of updates (both current and retrospective) to come! 

-Claudia

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Imagine you have to explain puberty to a kid. But you have to write it down in advance, so you don’t get to listen or see any body language. And wait–it’s not just one kid. It’s thousands. And you’re not just speaking for  yourself, but an institution you care about.

You can probably imagine why I procrastinated over writing about puberty for the Being Human exhibit. The topic was embarrassing, and my attempts to explain it were worse.

That’s where I stayed stuck until I realized I was trying to do the wrong job. The science centre isn’t a place that would ”explain puberty to a kid.” I had to find a way to include information about puberty without acting like the expert.

I considered trying a pilot (mocking up a version of the exhibit for people to try–our usual way of figuring out what to do), but pilots show how people react to an activity. I needed to know what people thought was important. I needed to crowdsource.

Crowdsourcing can mean a lot of things. The website Kiva.org crowdsources philanthropy by connecting people who are willing to lend money with aspiring entrepreneurs in developing countries. Threadless.com solicits t-shirt designs from users and sells the ones that get the most votes. Then there’s wikipedia. [All of these examples are from Jeff Howe’s book Crowdsourcing, which goes into way more detail than I can here.]

I decided to keep it simple. Being Human was scheduled to be the focus of the next Market Collective, so I made a big sign reading, “what should everyone know about being a teen?” and put out a thick stack of cards suggesting topics (zits, hair, hygiene, voice changing, hard-ons, periods, hormones and crushes–somehow I forgot to include breasts) along with straight pins so people could stick them on the wall.

The resulting notes were insightful, emotional, practical and funny. Here’s how we used them in the final graphic describing puberty for guys (there’s another for girls):

We also added a projector to the puberty area in Being Human and scanned the rest of the cards to make a slideshow.

Piloting and crowdsourcing have a lot in common. They tap into visitors’ knowledge and ideas. If you keep it simple they don’t require much time or money. They do require humility.

The differences are important. Piloting is all about how. How do people react? How does the exhibit work (or not)? How could it be improved? Crowdsourcing is better at what. What do people care about? What perspectives have you missed?

Knowing what question you’re trying to answer determines how to proceed. To pilot, mock up the final exhibit experience. When you’re crowdsourcing it’s often better not to approximate the final exhibit. When people perceive themselves as making an exhibit, they clam up or try to sound like a ‘science centre.’ But when visitors are intrigued by your questions and feel safe enough to respond honestly, they can be the source of some brilliant ideas.

–Katherine

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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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We are getting ready for Market Collective where we want to create a time lapse video of the cardboard forest we’ll be building over the weekend. (If you’re in town, come by and help!)

We’ve used a lot of kludges to create time lapse videos over the course of this project. I’m here to announce there will be no more time lapse rdiculousness because I just found the best time lapse software in the world and it’s open source!

Gawker

Download it. This program is amazing! Seriously, it took me 45 seconds to schedule and make a time lapse video of the Lab. It can also do motion detected video, which I haven’t tried yet because I had to stop messing around with it to write this post.

Actually, it is taking infinitely longer to find a VGA adapter to connect it to a computer. Anybody have one we can borrow?

-dana

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We piloted this program at Market Collective back in December because at the time toys and holidays seemed to fit really well.   Since then we have had requests to bring our toys and tools to other community partners any time of the year.  (Which is pretty great – I would gladly run this forever.  And we’ve kept all the creations.  They are on display at the current Creative Kids Museum and we will move them along with us to the New Science Centre).

Most recently we were at the International Festival of Animated Objects Opening Galabash hosted by the Calgary Animated Objects Society (CAOS) in March.  This is in part a bar with a concert showcase, puppet peep shows, and includes participants dressed like Muppets.

What I found really great about Toy Mash Up here was these people gave behaviors, voices, and in part played with their creations as they developed.  It was like a five year old birthday party full of imagination, but more wicked (no surprise these folks love puppetry).  Also, Quickdraw Animation Society was on hand with a city scene and cameras to create stop motion movies not unlike Godzilla.  Check it out:

Toy Mash Up at CAOS Gala

The CAOS crew hanging out after world domination:

-Stacey

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Next week we kick off fabrication of the Human Body exhibit. It’s making me nostalgic for last year, when we had lots of time to experiment with exhibit ideas. So I decided that over the next few months I’d look back in my files, and post pilots that ran exactly a year ago.

I’m going to cheat a little, and write about what we did over Halloween in 2009. It was our introduction to one of my favourite events: piloting at Market Collective, a local hipster craft fair. We found out about the opportunity at the last minute, so we brought ideas we had ready to go—a camera obscura, heart rate parking meter and LED wristbands—and coaxed people to try them. We planned to try fort-building, but it imploded at the last minute so we put up big talkback walls instead. The day was somewhat informative (mostly about how not to pilot at Market Collective) and very tiring.

We made big changes for the next time: no facilitated activities, a coherent DIY look for pilots and graphics, and just one topic. Since it was Valentine’s Day, we chose to test ideas for Sex, Sexuality and Reproduction.

I’ll go into more detail about the specific pilots on another day, but they were risky. We gave people the chance to talk about their sexuality, their regrets and their triumphs, and people took it farther (simultaneously daring and respectful) than I could have hoped.

Over and over, people commented that if this is what we’ll have at the new science centre, maybe it really would be a place for them. They hadn’t visited the science centre since elementary school, and hadn’t planned to visit until they had kids. We started to hear people announce, “Here it is! My friend told me I needed to see this!” as they walked in the room.

Now, when we mention being at Market Collective, people brighten and say how much they liked the pilots. Outside groups have sought us out to bring Market Collective-style pilots to other events. When Dana was organizing events for the Choose Yer Own festival, one person (who didn’t know where Dana worked) said she to do an event “like what the science centre does at Market Collective.”

It’s even reached programs on site. Over the summer Vlad Amiot tried collaborative paintings, a talkback wall asking people about their bodies, and idiosyncratic, introspective charts for visitors to fill. Staff members—even ones who’d never go to an event like Market Collective—cite these projects with pride, as examples of what they are excited that the NSC will be.

–Katherine

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