ECSITE Tinkering Workrooms
Over the past four weeks, a group of us from science centers all around Europe (and the world) banded together to create a series of ‘workrooms’ to engage the larger making/tinkering community at ECSITE (The European network of science centres and museums). These workrooms consisted four online sessions over four weeks chock full of hands-on activities, presentations, discussions and inspiring examples. I was amazed to learn about the wide variety of topics for tinkering explorations in various museums including smartphone sensors, responsive plants, printmaking, ice, kombucha leather and even jellyfish!
One of the most important elements for the workroom series was creating a sense of community and belonging. The starting activity at the first session, ‘making faces’ led by Ryoko and Deanna of the Tinkering Studio, was a great way to playfully introduce ourselves while showing some of our favorite materials. We wanted to see if the conversations could continue in between the weekly sessions on a Miro board that we set up for the workroom. Posting our self-portraits allowed participants to get started using that sharing platform and it was fun to see the collection of handmade faces grow to include all 40 participants and presenters!
Over the course of the next three sessions we tried several hands-on activities including 3D designs with Jochen and Britta of jh Museum & exhibition design, toilet paper tube transformation with Bea of Artencurs and cell phone sensors with Berit and Jutta from Deutsches Museum. We heard about online experiments from Inka, May and Monika, tinkering inspirations from Vanessa, Juanita and Samar and examples of learner engagement from Inka, Monika and Hanna.
In our last session this past Thursday, Sebastian shared some new frameworks developed by the Tinkering Studio for ways of thinking about the tinkering process and the group discussed their next steps for projects both individually and at their institutions in the coming months. We’re excited to keep in touch with this group, identify connections between people and projects, and continue sharing at the online ECSITE conference in June.