Motorized Balance Sculptures at Technorama

This past weekend I led two experimental tinkering workshops at the bildungs congress (education conference) at Technorama science center in Winterthur, Switzerland. For the theme of the sessions I build on the ‘weighted wobblers’ exploration in my book, The Tinkering Workshop, and added in some motors to offer the possibility to build spinning balancing sculptures.

Trying out this new flavor of balancing sculpture with a group of creative educators gave us the chance to reflect about the design choices that lead to tinkerable experiences. I wanted to share a couple ideas about materials preparations, examples and workshop flow that I’m thinking about after these sessions.

For this workshop we started with about fifteen minutes of explorations with just wire and weights to build balancing sculptures before adding in motors. I’m still a little unsure about how to approach the idea that the weight should be below the balance point to make the object stay in place. On one hand I really like how that’s something that people can discover but on the other hand I’m worried that it feels too much like a “secret” that I’m consciously holding back from participants. It’s really important to have that concept in mind when making the more complicated motorized sculptures and I hope through examples and a pause for discussion I would like to draw that out naturally.

In this way I think that it’s also interesting to think about the ways that the balancing sculpture examples affect the experience. I think it’s important to clearly show a variety of concepts like having the heavy objects on the bottom and the possibility of having light weights far off the center balancing with heavy objects closer to the middle. I think that this project can move away from explorations and I’m hoping that the variety of examples can push learners more in that direction.

For many tinkering activities there’s the question of how much to prebuild for participants or how much of the frustration to try to remove from the activity. In my mind I usually think about the idea of “non-productive” frustration or challenges that are not in the service of making ideas work but more just about getting the materials to function. The motorized sculptures project already introduces a lot of variables and one thing that I saw participants struggling with in the first workshop were the small delicate leads on the pager motors connecting to the coin cell batteries. Before the second workshop I ended up wrapping the leads around small washers and attaching them with copper tape. These gave participants a bit of an easier time to make the connections while still leaving a lot of possibility for prototyping unique designs for on/off switches.

All of these questions are fun to test and experiment with during workshops as I try to refine the materials, examples and prompts to make things more tinkerable. Looking forward to more chances to try out these experiments including my next scheduled workshop at the Carl Schurz Haus on November 22nd.