WICO World Tour Origins and Inspirations

This week we’re start the first season of ‘A Tinkering World Tour’, an online course where a group of intrepid participants will virtually travel to five locations around the world and pop into makerspaces, artists’ workshops and kitchen table tinkering studios. It’s an exciting experiment on many different levels.

For one, it’s the first time that I’ve been able to experiment with a crowd-funding model for a workshop. There are a lot of logistics to manage but I’m really interested in testing out in this open and transparent way to support new workshops and projects that will only happen when there is interest from the community. It’s also a new challenge to think about planning hands-on online sessions that can work well both asynchronously and live over zoom. I’m really excited to have a group of sixty participants and about a dozen presenters who have already signed up to join this session and help develop the idea in real time.

Although there are a lot of new elements to the workshop, the idea has also been many years in the making. Before we start the adventure, I wanted to take a look back as some origins and inspirations for the Tinkering World Tour project!

The first inspiration to the project that comes to mind is the experience of playing Where in the World is Carmen San Diego on an Apple IIc in the garage. As a child, I loved how the game opened up possibilities for discovering new and interesting places around the world. We tried to solve the mysteries with a almanac in hand and looked up facts about the world while figuring out the mysteries.

I also have to give a shout out to the GeoSafari, a early piece of educational hardware with an endless set of cards to explore and practice geography. While these educational experiences aren’t what I would think of as open-ended nowadays, I do think they introduced the sense of fun and possibility to traveling vicariously around the world.

Photo by Eric Rosenbaum

At the tinkering studio I half-jokingly started the “tinkering t-shirt challenge”, a informal contest among colleagues and collaborators to take a picture wearing our Tinkering Studio™ shirt in as many worldwide locations as possible including a freezing glacier, a tropical beach and a surprisingly lush Siberian plain. I think this little prompt offered people a chance to tell a little story about where they were when they took the photo and why that memory was important to them.

Another project idea that maybe was a bit ahead of it’s time was the “cross country chain reaction” workshop that we tried at Tinkering Studio. The idea was to collaborate with about ten different museums across the USA to all build our own remote sections of a chain reaction that would be somehow connected to one another digitally. Funnily enough, we seemed to be anticipating a bit the video facilitation that we are currently living with during the pandemic. As well, we experimented with ways projects built by different makers might connect to each other even at a distance. This idea had a new iteration during the pandemic as a Tinkering Studio twitter hashtag (#roundtheworldchainreaction) that was contributed to by dozens of makers around the world. I think that these experiences highlighted to me the joy of working on a shared problem with others on the other side of the city, country or world.

As well, over the past ten years or so I’ve also had the amazing opportunity to physically travel to museums, schools and informal learning centers around the world to lead tinkering workshops and activities. Before the pandemic I flew all over the place to facilitate tinkering experiences and activities in places as different as Kuwait, Denmark, India and Singapore.

There are two things that have usually stuck with me about these encounters. First is that people from Texas to Taiwan are often convinced that a tinkering based approach to learning “won’t work here” because of factors as varied as the attitude of parents, the pressures of schools or the lack of experience with hands-on activities for most kids.

However, when people start exploring materials, testing ideas and collaborating with each other there seems to be a near universal joy, excitement and sense hard fun that springs to the surface. I’m hoping that during this world tour we can uncover how a constructionist learning style can appeal to kids and adults everywhere and that play is a common human technique of developing understanding about the world.

And just in the past few months, I’ve been collaborating with the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in the UK to develop a series of Automata Tinkering Workshops. These sessions have provided chances for adults to make, play and reflect together as they build kinetic sculptures. One of my favorite parts of the experience has been virtually visiting artists studios and hearing about the tools, materials and environments where they work. It would have been impossible to do these all of these field trips to different places in the world in person so only due to the pandemic have we needed to create the circumstances.

I also have loved watching the new Tim Hunkin series, The Secret Life of Components, which feels like a special glimpse inside a workshop with an old friend showing your tips and tricks. I hope that our World Tour workshop tours can capture a bit of this open unscripted spirit of dropping in on an old friend and seeing the projects and processes they are exploring.

And as a final inspiration I have to mention a couple of travel television shows including the recent Stanley Tucci show called “Finding Italy” and my all-time favorite Anthony Bourdain. I love how these programs help people discover a destination through the culture of food and I’ve been wondering for a while if we could do something similar by looking at the culture of making and tinkering in a specific place.

In my mind, this is the wonderfully weird and mixed up set of ingredients that have inspired the idea of our “A Tinkering World Tour” online workshop.

I’m genuinely curious and excited to see how it all turns out! If you want to join us on this adventure and virtually visit artists, makers and educational spaces in Nairobi, Berlin, Kyoto, New Mexico and Aarhus don’t wait to sign up.

We’ll stop accepting more zoom tinkerers at the end of the day on Monday 4/26 and we’ll end the season one fundraiser on Friday. Hope you will be able to join this constructionist expedition and discover ways of making and tinkering all over the world with us!