Tinkering R&D Process: Focus on Kaleidoscopes

Over the past several months, I’ve been collaborating with colleagues at the Tinkering Studio and the LEGO Playful Museum Learning Network TIPs (tinkering inventive playsets) group on new materials and prompts for exploring kaleidoscopes.

Some of the versions of the activity that we have experimented with during this phase of the project, include adding in spinning motors, looking at programmed scenes, projecting images both with pinholes and beamers, creating a loose part station and designing ways to easily capture the results of our experiments on digital cameras.

As well, we have been working together to articulate and share tinkering R&D principles through examples and documentation. Ryoko built a great visual representation of the process out of cardboard and printed photos for the LEGO playful museum learning network gathering in Boston.

In this post, I wanted to look at this round of kaleidoscope prototyping as a concrete example of the R&D process and explain a bit more how these design principles manifest in our ongoing investigations. I’m hoping that this documentation will spark more conversations, ideas and questions about what’s important when designing tinkering activities.

One of the principles that I see clearly in our process with prototyping kaleidoscopes is the idea of “tinkering within reach” or using accessible materials and small first steps when working on new projects. One of the reasons that the kaleidoscopic theme resulted in so many different ideas is that we started using cardboard, toilet paper tubes and mirrored cardstock as the basis of the first prototypes.

While a final version might use more sturdy or robust materials, the flexible, customizable parts allow for many quick experiments with different iterations of size, functionality and aesthetics. If we had to wait to cut wood or laser acrylic plastic everything would have been more precious and we might have been less willing to try things without knowing the results.

Another thing that I see clearly in the process of kaleidoscope TIPs research and development is the practice of “revisiting old ideas” and valuing the history of these explorations. As we started thinking about possibilities for the project we referenced a shadow kaleidoscope exhibit development back in the early days of the TS and a cardboard tube / smartphone version that we made in collaboration with Lighthouse Community Charter School in Oakland. Even the theme of kaleidoscopes in general came from a discarded idea during the original UFTE design process back in the fall of 2021. It’s important that the specific exhibit designs, workshop materials and facilitation prompts are not meant to end with a single event or public program, but represent an ongoing exploration.

Another element in the R&D process that surfaced during the design process is to try and make “feedback visibly apparent” for ourselves and participants. One of the ways that this took shape during the kaleidoscope prototyping was the effort to make the images produces by the angled mirrors larger, more visible and open to collaboration. A few specific ways that we have tried this so far is by creating a kaleidoscope lens for a mini webcam connected to a projector and making cardboard digital camera holders so that the kaleidoscopes can have a screen up front. The more that we can make the results of the explorations visible to ourselves and participants, the more relevant feedback we can get on the ideas.

During the prosses, we have been committed to “sharing and remixing half-baked ideas” and “working as a collective”. This mostly takes place on our slack page where there are over fifty museum designers and educators who post and comment on each others project. Some of the things that are shared on the board are directly related to other projects. There are many questions about what materials different people used for the examples. There’s often the desire to remake something similar from what someone else tried so that we can better understand the process that we’re all going through.

The sharing of in-progress ideas also happens on this blog and other publicly facing sites. This is also crucial to show our extended network the process the we go through to develop ideas and openly invite feedback and suggestions. We try to reference the things that inspire us and the ideas that we want to try someday. I even shared a version of the kaleidoscope project with a professional development workshop group at Deutsches Museum to show something before it had been fully realized. All of this sharing hopefully will invite others to collaborate with us and make the ideas better as they are in development.

And finally, it’s important to notice that the principle of “inefficiency as a feature, not a bug” applies here and that it’s important of creating things that don’t work at all or lead to “dead ends”. This one can be a little hard to reconcile if you are working toward an idea that you care about and want to find robust ways to share with others.

For this kaleidoscope project we spent several months working on ideas, and although there are many possible directions that we’ve identified, we haven’t yet settled on a final version similar to the rhythm blocks or balance stands from previous phases of the LEGO museum network project. Part of that might be a lack of time or in-person collaboration but I also think that the topic is presenting us with too many options and we’re not ready to narrow the pathway quite yet.

The “efficient” path of quickly choosing a direction and spending energy trying to make it sturdy enough to withstand the wear and tear of the museum floor might have cut off exciting explorations. Although that would have led to a quicker “final product”, the area of investigation would have been less rich for it. There are several possibilities for more solid versions of these exploration sets and as they become ready we will move toward more robust versions but for now the “inefficient” process of making many prototypes and sharing them has generated plenty of worthwhile ideas.

As we continue developing this tinkerable inventive playset and others like it, we’ll continue to reflect on the process that we go through as designers. We are curious to know what are the most familiar and what are the most surprising for our colleagues working in similar settings. If you all have other ideas about important R&D principles, we would be interested to compare notes and learn from each other.

The LEGO Playful Learning Museum Network initiative is made possible through generous support from the LEGO Group.