Well, this is strange.
Stacey and I spent a good chunk of the day trying remember how to build working Cyclotropes for a drop-in program in Open Studio. In theory this should have been easy, put the frames of an animation on a bike wheel and spin it in front of a webcam. If you get the wheel’s speed to match the shutter of the camera you get a neat animation. We got pretty good at doing it last summer when we ran a Cyclotrope workshop for Cyclepalooza, but somehow in the past 9 months we completely forgot the subtleties of the set-up.

After a frustrating morning of messing around with webcams and light sources I googled “cyclotrope troubleshooting” and the first hit was the Prototype Lab blog post Alex wrote about our process last year working on the same project! Even though I worked with Alex to solve these same problems last time, it was really helpful to re-read the things we figured out.

It actually took about 5 minutes to get our Cyclotrope working after reading Alex’s post. Ten points for documentation! And thanks Alex!

-dana

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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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Its been a while since we’ve had the Prorotype Lab open, but you can still be involved.

Come to this DIY Instrument and Circuit Bending workshop this weekend at Local Library!

We’ ll be exploring the weird and wild side of DIY technology, Frankensteining beloved childhood toys and making our joints sing in a series of afternoon workshops.

The New Science Centre team will be doing a Circuit Bending drop-in program that we’re planning for the NSC. Our pal Craig Storm will be showing us how to make Light Theramins. I’ll be helping people (somehow) hack circuits to our bodies to make a giant dance piano. And there will be a free tour of Cantos at the end.

Come play and learn stuff!

This Saturday, June 4th, 1-4pm
Local Library
131 7th Ave SW. Entrance is from the alley behind the church.

-dana

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This afternoon Mike and I went to the amazing Black Forest Wood Company to search for materials to build the exhibit tables for TSA. We chose several types of wood that we thought would be good for TSA and I stained half of each chunk so we could see how the colors will shift once the tables are finished.

On the floor by Mike’s desk, we sorted our wood samples based on what they looked like. Then we remembered that durability matters a lot in TSA, those tables are going to get beaten up everyday for the rest of their lives. So to evaluate the hardness we invented the new NSC standard hardness test—we forked it.

We nabbed a fork off Stacey’s desk and poked each wood sample to see how it would wear. (Sorry Stacey, that fork was probably for your lunch or something.)

The results of the fork test… Beech and hickory are the hardest light colored woods. Yay for beech and hickory!! Unfortunately, we think that hickory is kind of ugly.  So you can expect to see some lovely tables made out of beech and maple in TSA.  Unless, of course, beech and maple turn out to be unbearably expensive and then I guess it’s back to Black Forest to find more samples of wood to poke with a fork.

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I’ve been researching the way Arthur Ganson makes gears for the wind-up kinetics pilot I’m working on this week. I came across a TED Talk where Ganson beautifully describes his art, being obsessed with making things move and how it feels to build things with his hands.

http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_ganson_makes_moving_sculpture.html

It makes me proud to be a maker. Check it out.

-dana!

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