Tinkering with Uftes at Ecsite 2022
Last week, the European science center network met in Heilbronn, Germany for the first in-person Ecsite Conference since 2019. As usual, a team of dedicated tinkerers put together a welcoming, playful and inspiring makerspace as part of the program, this time sponsored by the LEGO Foundation. It was a great chance to share some of the projects that we’ve been working on at Wonderful Idea Co over the last year and reconnect with this collection of colleagues.
This year the Ecsite conference took place in an outdoor environment with a series of tents arranged to form a little campus structure. The Tinkering Space had a dedicated tent for all three days of the conference and the volunteer team of makers set up signs, examples and inspirations both inside and out of the space.
The first session of Day 1 was a look back at some of the experiments with online workshops that we’ve tried over the pandemic period. I spoke about the Cabaret Mechanical Theater online automata workshop and the Tinkering World Tour. And we head from other presenters about parents as facilitators, working with new audiences and trying new digital tools. Our session focused on ideas for the best way to form a tinkering community and what can continue after the Covid-19 period.
For the second session of the day, we focused on the ways that ‘tinkering like an artist’ could be a inspiring idea for developing new hands-on projects. We took inspiration from Austin Kleon who writes about the ways that artist ideas can be shared, cited, remixed and transformed by a community of practice. Working with the Tinkering Studio to develop four new ‘uftes’ for the Exploratorium over the last months reflected this idea so it was the perfect time to share rhythm blocks and kinetic sculptures.
The sound and balance themed uftes were one part of a workshop that included solar drawing machines, programmable art makers and analog polarization filters. It was really great to see the connection between our prototyping work and many other in-progress tinkering activities.
As always, when you try a tinkering activity with a group of engaged museum professionals, you get lots of new ideas to incorporate into the projects. A pair of tinkerers made a surprising rhythm block tower and it was really fun to see the combination of the long offset balance bases with colorful clip-on shapes.
In both informal conversations and a whole group share out, we heard reflections about the experience of trying ‘uftes’ as a learner. Some of the things that stood out to me in the conversation were the idea that the materials aren’t too polished which give the participants the chance to take ownership, that there are a limited set of materials that provide endless possibilities and that even these short experiences really made people feel like an artist, composer or creator.
The Ecsite conference is a truly special moment where educators and designers from all over the world come to play, discuss, invent and connect around making and tinkering. I was really happy to join the conference again this year and share our in-progress uftes. I know I left with lots of new inspiration and I hope that this interaction can lead to new experiments and prototypes for both rhythm blocks and kinetic sculptures uftes.
The LEGO Playful Learning Museum Network initiative is made possible through generous support from the LEGO Group.