Visits to ReDiscover Center and Thinkery
Over the past couple of weeks I spent some time in California and Texas and was able to visit a couple of interesting making and tinkering spaces that I hadn’t been to before. I always get inspired by seeing new collection of materials, environments and projects and I wanted to share some of my impressions of these explorations here.
The first place that I went to was ReDiscover in Los Angeles. This is an amazing organization that uses all sorts of recycled materials for their tinkering explorations that happen in camps and classes. I visited the original location in Venice and was excited to hear about a second space that they are currently opening up in Mid-City.
Coming in the space you are greeting by a wide variety of inspirational projects hanging on the wall, peeking out of shelves, covering the floor and hanging from the ceiling. There’s a real sense of history and culture of making and tinkering that can only be built up over time. The wide variety of materials and tools were lovingly organized. And I especially appreciated the mix of indoor space with a covered semi-outdoor space for working with larger tools and materials.
Later on in the visit I went to Texas to try to get a glimpse of the total solar ecclipse. The weather didn’t fully cooperate during totality but we got some nice looks at the partial through the clouds and experienced the dramatic darkness that descended during the totality. Along with that experience I spent a few days in Austin and visited The Thinkery, a museum that’s been on my radar for a while.
It was really cool to see the emphasis on making and tinkering projects that greeted visitors right as they walked into the exhibition space. There was a large gallery with lots of tinkering-inspired exhibits like linkages, windtubes, microscope stations and a stop motion animation bench. I felt that this area was really pushing to have loose parts and learner driven experiences. One thing that I look for in museums are little personal hidden touches scattered around the space. The Thinkery had many of these little art or science projects that one could discover if they were paying close attention to their surroundings.
Right past the large making gallery was a more focused tinkering workshop area with a large shared workspace, metal lockers full of tinkering materials and lots of interesting examples strewn around the space. There was good lighting and comfortable stools so that kids and adults could spend a long time working on projects.
In this space I found a light play prototype that one of our colleagues from the LEGO playful museum learning network has been working on as part of our TIPs (tinkering inventive playsets) work. It was cool to see this station that riffed on the TInkering Studio instructable but added off-the-shelf lights, a larger workspace, a more prominent motor and magnetic zones for the lights to stick onto. It’s always great to see how these ideas evolve in different spaces, especially when being testing with visitors to the space.
A couple other miscellaneous things that I appreciated included a couple of die-cutter machines that could be freely used by visitors, a light/shadow gallery with a dedicated light play station, corrals for younger kids to play and work without being directly in the flow of people and a DIY magnetic poetry board made with scraps of cardboard and sharpies.
It’s always wonderful to get the chance to visit other museums and education centers. Thanks so much to the team of ReDiscover Center and Thinkery for showing be around and I hope there’s more chances to collaborate in the future!