2023 Year in Review

At the start of each new year, I like to take a moment to briefly look back on the past twelve months and reflect about the successes, challenges and exciting new opportunities that emerged during that time. Now is an exciting moment for Wonderful Idea Co. as many of the projects that started in 2023 are building towards bigger and better iterations in the coming year.

The year was full of conference presentations and professional development workshops around the world. I led “introduction to tinkering” sessions at the National Children's Museum in Washington DC and Universum in Bremen, Germany and I had a playful residency at the Connecticut Science Center. I gave a virtual keynote presentation at the Dokk1 library in Aarhus, led a workshop at the Inter:aktion conference at Experimenta (in German!) and was interviewed on a creative technology podcast.

Productive collaboration continues with the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium to prototype new tinkering inventive playsets or “TIPs” as part of the LEGO Playful Learning Museum Network. TIPs combine elements of facilitated workshops and more stand-alone museum exhibit experiences to make playful, robust and open-ended opportunities for learners to test out their own ideas around a chosen topic. The themes we explored this year were treadmill rollers, circuit cities and kaleidoscopes. In the next year this collaboration will deepen as we share and work with other institutions to try out new themes and find new ways to articulate our prototyping process.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been working on putting together a book aimed at giving kids open-ended prompts to explore everyday materials through a tinkering lens. This summer. I traveled to the headquarters of the publisher, Storey Publishing in North Adams, Massachusetts for a week-long photoshoot of the highlighted projects. It was really fun to take the time to set up the materials and examples and work with a group of kids that modeled the process (and actually tinkered themselves along the way). The book will be released in the fall of 2024 and I’m looking forward to seeing how this new resource can bring tinkering ideas to new audiences.

This year, our team of remote facilitators led the eighth and ninth iterations of the automata tinkering global workshop with the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre. These workshops continue to impress with an amazing collection of participants who really dive deeply into the world of automata. Going forward, we’re planning to run this virtual workshop once a year but an exciting development that happened this year is the opening of a physical makerspace for CMT in Hastings. The experimental space will provide more possibilities for in-person sessions as well!

In the summer, I got the chance to visit the new makerspace as well as make it out to Cornwall to visit Paul Spooner, Will Jackson and see a collection of automata inspirations around Falmouth.

Freiburg, Germany has been my second home for the past three years and in 2023 I’ve been working to deepen connections with local making and tinkering educators and designers I’m continuing to collaborate with Spielmobil, leading workshops with colleagues at the nearby TinkerTank in Ludwigsburg and networking with teachers, librarians and informal educators. In the next months we’ll be leading our first professional development workshop (in the BAME style) here in Freiburg alongside visiting artists Kenn and Annabelle from A Secret Club in Aarhus Denmark. Starting with this session, I’m hoping to continue to develop more sustainable projects here over the next year.

And in the greatest tinkering adventure so far, this year has been filled with the experiences of new fatherhood. We are learning so much from watching our son play and explore with the world around him. As we jump into the new year I try to take inspiration from his perspective of curiosity, enthusiasm and experimentation with the world.

Thank you to all of Wonderful Idea Co’s global network collaborators, thinking partners, co-facilitators and inspirators. Looking forward to another year full of discovery, explorations and tinkering.