In an interestingly synchronistic turn of events:
I recently learned that Mickey Hart is working on a project that will, in grandiose terms, “turn the Golden Gate Bridge into a giant wind harp”. Link to article here.
The Creative Kraken – inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge, Angler Fish, Da Vinci’s Catapult, and the skeleton of a Grey Whale – is in fact a giant interactive wind harp that people and the wind can play with.
We hope to see you at the Museum, Mickey!
After months of research, meetings with various stakeholders, prototyping, and applying our insights to refine our design, we are now ready to begin fabricating our interactive, kinetic wind and sound sculpture.
At our last meeting at the museum, I chalked an actual-sized outline of the installation for the museum staff to get a sense of the scale of the piece; 12 feet wide at the opening of the base, 17 foot long legs, 15 foot tall supports, and a 35 foot long cantilevered spine which will suspend our “lure” (a collection of Indian copper bells and maritime doodads).
One exciting aspect of this participatory design process has been the decision to build our sculpture out of bamboo and our subsequent partnership with bamboo building experts Darrel Deboer and Kevin Rowell.
I spent the earlier part of this week on Darrel’s property in El Sobrante working with artist Brit Howard to begin construction. First we were careful to select the best pieces of bamboo – 20 foot long sections of Phyllostachys bambusoides.
Then we set about cutting, arranging and bolting our poles.
I’m off to Costa Rica for 2 weeks and when I return, we’ll complete the piece and install it at the Museum!! Stay tuned…
Is Sweden’s Classroom-Free School the Future of Learning?
by Liz Dwyer; re-posted by Zakary Zide
The traditional setup of school classrooms—straight rows of desks with accompanying chairs—doesn’t do much to foster creativity or collaboration. Many experts have proposed redesigning classroom furniture, but a Swedish school system wants to take things a step further. Vittra, which operates 30 schools in Sweden, is seeking to ensure learning takes place everywhere on campus by eliminating classrooms altogether.
The newest Vittra school, Telefonplan, opened its doors last August. Designed by architecture firm Rosan Bosch, the Stockholm-area campus seems more like a creative space you’d find at Google or Pixar than a school at all. Students can work independently on their laptops while lounging on one of the “sitting islands” in the photo above. If they need to collaborate with their peers on a project, they can take advantage of spaces like “the village”—a tiny house for group work—or the more open “organic conversation furniture” pictured below.
Jannie Jeppesen, the principal of Vittra Telefonplan writes on the school’s website that the design is intended to stimulate “children’s curiosity and creativity” and offer them opportunities for both collaborative and independent time. Vittra doesn’t award traditional grades, either—students are taught in groups according to level—so maximizing diverse teaching and learning situations is a priority.
The open nature of the campus and the unusual furniture arrangements reflect the school’s philosophy that “children play and learn on the basis of their needs, curiosity, and inclination.” That’s true for kids all over the world, so let’s hope educators in other countries begin to pay attention.
More interesting photos and content here.
The current program in Art Studio 10 is inspired by artist Patrick Dougherty and his natural sculpting process. Using willow, reed, cardboard and burlap, children and grownups are encouraged to explore and experiment. The environment of the space inspires collaboration as visitors create, interact with, and name the sculptures. Our works in progress grow and evolve through techniques such as weaving, tangling, looping, attaching, threading, twirling, wrapping and bending.
Had a great day of design exploration with Environmental Architect Scott McGlashen and artist Brit Howard. Talk about creative collaboration – it’s amazing what can happen when the flood gates open and the creative kraken is unleashed!
After considerable discussion and consideration, we realized that we were focusing too much of the design on the base of the installation. We had gotten carried away with making a really cool looking car that had a dangly thing hanging off of it. We had to back up and remember that the most interesting, compelling, and playful component of the prototypes were the bouncy, dangly arms, and their sonic qualities.
So we decided to emphasize and elevate the bouncy length of the arm in order to maximize it’s playfulness and interactivity. Calling upon the nearby coast for inspiration, we thought, why not hold the arm up with the architecture of a whale skeleton. With a backward looking eye, we turned to the site’s historical past for additional material, engineering and aesthetic clues. Once an active military base, we didn’t have to look much further than Davinci’s catapult (and mechanical drawings).
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, start your engines. Or non-violent catapults-cum-giant-interactive-wind-harps, as the case may be.
For the past couple of weeks, the Creativity Installation project has had me immersed, thinking about and exploring topics such as form, function, interactivity, collaboration, safety, invention, discovery, and of course, creativity.
Through the research process, I have been able to identify and ground the design language in the history of the Museum’s site, including it’s relationship to the military, it’s proximity to the ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge, as well as the local weather conditions.
I also found some incredible inspiration images! I’m now a minor expert in the design typology of antique horse drawn sleighs and carriages, vintage tanks, tractors and wooden wagon wheels. It’s been interesting to follow my thought process as I connect the design dots between angler fish, snow mobiles, a pair of earrings, steam powered bulldozers, a radiator fan, the sculptures of Martin Puryear and the architecture of Rena Dumas.
It was somewhere between the angler fish and the radiator fan that I started thinking about my creative process. Studies (Getzels 1988) have found that creative people tend to:
• Have a “discovery orientation”
• Are more risk taking than average
• Flexible to changing direction
• Possess a willingness to question norms and assumptions
• Ask novel questions
• Have wide interests
I have found that through the process of gathering a mountain of information and following countless leads, I eventually reach a kind of creative saturation / tipping point. At times it feels like getting sucked into a creative vortex (in a good way).
It goes something like this:
After immersing myself in the subject -examining it from as many angles as time and budget will allow, and after deconstructing it down to it’s essential components- I find that I have to stop consciously thinking about it. I have to allow my mind some time to digest and process all on its own, in the background of my life. And then a day or so later, I’ll be looking at a magazine or a movie or a plant and all of these ideas, images associations and connections will start to rush out of mind – and I scramble to capture as many as I can.
I’ve found that you can’t engineer lucky accidents and creative solutions, but through diligence you can trust (anticipate) that they will eventually happen.
What is the purpose of a mud puddle?
During a recent 
Connections program, it seemed all too quiet at the front corner of the Outdoor Learning Lab. When I rounded the corner to enter the digging node, I heard a soft splat-splat-splat. A solitary girl, 4 years old, was standing with her belly pressed against the stainless steel dirt trough. She was concentrating intently; lifting mud by the handful and slinging it gently back onto the surface of an expertly mixed bog of soil and water. A smile slowly spread across her face as I watched her submerge first her fingertips, then her palms and finally her wrists in the cool mud puddle.
Conservationist Rachel Carson told us:
Being with a child is largely a matter of becoming receptive to what lies all around you. It is learning again to use your eyes, ears, nostrils, and fingertips, opening up the disused channels of sensory impression. For most of us knowledge comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”
Before environmental stewardship comes empathy for the natural world. Before empathy come direct and authentic encounters with nature. Mud puddles provide chil
dren with a place to become immersed. A child might explore the possible changes in color, sound, texture, and smell as she mixes water into soil. She might notice the tickle of tangled roots from the grasses last growing in that soil. She may wonder why a tiny millipede is running off in such a rush as she mixes and pours. Or perhaps she’ll simply absorb how the reflection of late afternoon sun bouncing off of the surface of wet earth can make her feel calm, connected, and secure. This is a beginning. This is the purpose of a mud puddle.
- Heather Miller, Connections Manager
We have been exploring some options for programming to coincide with artist Patrick Dougherty’s creative process. He built the beloved Haywire willow sculpture in Lookout Cove (see our video saying goodbye to Haywire) and will be returning in January 2012 to create something new. We have been experimenting with bending, weaving, snagging, and flexing reed to understand the weaving/sculpting process and make it our own.
For three days we tested three iterations of a “giant toy that kids and the wind can play with.”
Testing these prototypes was extremely informative. In addition to gathering important structural and functional data, I was able to observe, listen to, and interview a wide range of users.
adult child sculpture interaction
15 second video
Designing for 5 educational / behavioral outcomes -exploration, discovery, imagination, connection, and immersion- as well as aesthetic interest and beauty. Intergenerational learning and an appeal to a variety of developmental stages were also important targets for my design to hit. My research would suggest that the prototypes successfully ticked all of the boxes.
more adult child sculpture interactions
15 second video
Some quotable quotes from users:
• “I really like how they engage the imagination – very Dr. Suess-like.”
• “Dada, look how strong I am!”
• “They’re so fun, beautiful, cool and fantastical.”
• “I like that it teaches teamwork.”
• “I like that they are fun for my older and younger kids.”
• “I like that you can see (experience) the cause and effect.”
• “I like that the designs are simple yet really engaging and interactive.”
• “I like that it goes up and down.”
• “I like that it teaches my kids about rhythms, patterns and cycles.”
• “I like the shadows!”
• “It has really enlivened this outdoor space.”
Example picture - unfortunately we don't have an image of our actual hawk!
One of the most special things about our new program Not-A-School is that we can take advantage “teaching moments’ that pop up in the natural environment here in Fort Baker. Last Tuesday when I walked into the classroom the phone was ringing. It was Danielle (we teach the program together) calling from across the street to tell me that she had noticed an injured Red-tailed hawk on her way driving in. When the kids arrived we told them about the hawk, and that Danielle had called Wildcare so someone could come and rescue the big bird. Most of the kids were interested in seeing the hawk up close so we loaded up our binoculars and headed out across the street.
When we got there we could see the hawk really clearly through the binoculars, and we asked the children, “Do you have any ideas about how the hawk might have gotten hurt?” Our friends all shared their ideas about what might have happened, or what part of the hawk’s body might be injured. After we looked at the big bird we played outside and watched when a van came from the Marin Humane Society to bring it to Wildcare. The children continued to talk about the hawk once their parents came to pick them up. Danielle and I decided to call Wildcare on Thursday when most of the kids would be back in the classroom so we could follow up on what happened.
On Thursday morning once everyone arrived I called Wildcare and put the call on speaker phone so our friends could hear. The woman on the phone was really nice and explained very clearly for the children that the juvenile hawk had an injured foot and so it hadn’t been able to hunt properly. She also told us that the hawk was starving so they were feeding it a mixture which she called “bird soup.” It was really amazing how much information the children retained from this phone call: what part of the hawk was injured, how old it was, what it was eating. Even children who hadn’t been with us to see the hawk became very interested in what had happened. The woman at Wildcare took down our phone number and told us that if the hawk could be re-released in Fort Baker they would call us and let us know so the children could witness the release!
That same day we offered the children clay, feathers and sticks to work on as an open-ended project. They used these materials to express their thoughts and ideas about the hawk. We also added models of a Red-tailed hawk egg, claw, and skull so they have a tangible representation of their experience. We can help children start to build empathy and compassion for the natural world by introducing them to the concept of wild animals, gathering their ideas about what happened, following up on the consequences and synthesizing their experiences into physical artifacts. We build on their interest in our local environment so they make the connection that people and animals have important things in common and we have the power to help animals in need. While we felt sad that this hawk was hurt, it was a powerful opportunity for our Not-A-School friends. We’re so thankful that an organization like Wildcare exists to both to care for wildlife and share valuable information with all of us.
- Heather Posner, Public Programs Manager