Play + Invent Museum Residency
Audience engagement | Visual Story Telling | Prop Making | Workshops
To coincide with the Discovery Museum in Newcastle opening a dedicated hands-on maker space for budding inventors, designers and makers within the museum I was invited to explore the museum and it's archives and become their first ‘Cardboard Engineer in Residence’.
"Creativity is intelligence having fun" - Einstein
The aim of the resulting work was to encourage the children visiting the museum to engage deeper with the collections and inspire them to use their imaginations to solve problems and inspire new inventions for future generations.
I’ve always loved science and industry museums, trying to decipher how the objects were used or how they used to move, the history behind their creation and the attached stories. The North East has so much heritage in this regard and their archives were a dream of a place to explore.
To help me sort the mass of inspiration I focused on placing a piece that fit within, and was inspired by, 3 of the different exhibition spaces at the museum. The residency ended with a series of accompanying workshops for families, you can find more detail on those here.
Science Maze - The Idea Extraction Engine
A huge variety of interactive displays bring science and engineering to life. You can find some of Joseph Swan's famous lightbulbs and a number of working engines and turbines.
For this space I wanted to make something that incorporated some of the different types of movements of many fantastic industrial machines in the gallery. Taking bits from different exhibits and incorporating then together. Unusually the museum actually have several of these working once a week run by a team of volunteers. Bringing the history to life and aiding in the understanding of how the mechanics of them actually functioned.
I invented the ‘Idea Extraction Engine’ to help sort your good ideas from bad resulting in a nice clear mind.
All the Fun of the Fair
All the Fun of the Fair charts the history and development of Newcastle’s much-loved Hoppings fair, first held on the Town Moor in 1882. Containing a unique collection of 50 vintage coin-operated amusement machines.
That you could actually play!
An excuse for a piece with all the internal mechanical movement of the amusement machines found in the exhibition. A slightly dastardly looking fairground operator who tipped his top hat to welcome visitors reminding them to convert to old pennies before entering.
Tyneside Challenge Gallery - Moranis.89
An exhibit that fitted in with the formatting of the signage in this gallery space, all exhibits details are presented in the format of,
The Challenge: The Answer: The Result
Most inventions were at one point in history considered wildly impossible but people worked away on them anyway. Inspired by the recent NASA announcement of their ‘Moon to Mars’ mission. I presented the Moranis.89, an Atomic Shrink Ray developed as a solution to lack of cargo space on deep space exploration missions, on loan to the Discovery Museum from NASA 2038.
