The Prototype Lab

Check back with us soon for our new hours during BODYWORLDS in April or email youth@calgaryscience.ca to book a visit!

AAM

Over four days at the American Association of Museums conference in Los Angeles I have alternated between three states:

Inspired: I fell in love with some artist/museum collaborations, got ideas from art and history museums, and overcame my skepticism of online programming after accidentally attending a session where I got to try it.

Exhausted: travel, thinking really hard all day, and evenings catching up with friends contributed, but hearing about visionless directors, "no"-loving colleagues, and really dire financial conditions at other museums and science centres exhausted me.

Proud: all of it reminded me of how unusual our project is. We've been given audacious goals and (most of) what we need to meet them. It was fun to watch people's faces go from impressed by our responsiveness to visitors, to overwhelmed by our piloting schedule, and, more often than not, ending up curious and a little jealous about what it's allowed us to do.

Last of all, this was my first conference representing a Canadian museum, and I took full advantage of the international lounge. Free coffee has never made me feel so privileged.

 

-Katherine

Meeting Yourself

Doppleganger
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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Pilot Happenings

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.

(download)

The Space Game

We are working hard to try and make the exit space work for testing pilots.  Yesterday We set up pilots in part of the hallway that leads to CKM.  We were pretty excited by how different we were able to make the space feel (a little light goes a long way). This meant that we had to invite people in, and that we had a smaller audience.  The benefit was that those people CHOSE to come into the space, and this meant that they were closer to being in the same kind of headspace we hope visitors to the New Science centre will be. I’m happy we are finding ways to do this – seeing Body Worlds can be a really powerful experience, and giving people a choice to either go home and relax, or think about something completely different is probably useful.

(download)

Simulations and Serious Games

20100510monstercrush

IBM has a development division that focuses on what they are calling: Serious Games.  They will be releasing a game called innoV8:cityONE “A Smarter Planet Game.”  It is targeted at urban planners and is actually being marketed as a training tool.  I think it is always interesting when we find new ways of getting people to think about problems in new ways, and to give them space to play and experiment on the road to discovering solutions. I am immediately cautious however, when a game that is about the future, cities and the environment is framed in a way where you are trying to “WIN.”  I would be curious to hear what other people think about the CityOne game, what are the strengths and weaknesses of simulations like this? What might be the benefits of an open or a closed kind of problem (one with a solution vs. one without)

Check out the PopSci Article about the game: ( http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-05/ibms-simcity-trains-planners-tackle-future-problems-growing-urban-centers)
Or the official website (the trailer is a bit ridiculously apocalyptic – maybe that is where my reaction is coming from) ( http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/cityone/index.html)

I was talking about the game to my colleague Brad and he mentioned another web based, multiplayer immersive world crisis solving game called URGENT EVOKE.  I’m going to take a closer look at this simulation/collaborative game.  The premise is to promote interdisciplinary collaboration by people all over the world to solve new and emergent wicked problems.  The crazy part is that it is being funded by the World Bank.  Take a look:  http://www.urgentevoke.com/