3 Little Steps Along a Byway at Invent Now
and what I learned on the trip.
Demonstrating that Innovators are Humans
Stepping Stone 1: Selecting an Every-Muse
Take a moment to glance through a few pictures in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Now imagine you're addressing a diverse, national, audience: impressionable kids, entrepreneurial undergrads, respected adults. Set yourself the aim of finding a small set of inventors to stand as models, to create a kinship, in every, single, individual in attendance.
Task: Your goal is to evoke a sense of self-confidence in the invention space, leading individuals to think, "I can do that," and set themselves on the path to trying.
One requirement: You must use these superhero inventors to do it. They're your rock stars. Who will you select for your muses?
My Role
At Invent Now I was one-third of the writing and content development team offering the material used by an 80-person team of sales, warehouse, graphic art, videography, grant-writing, education, delivery, and marketing professionals.
The experiences we crafted spanned age brackets and need brackets to help the world honor inductees to the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, help entrepreneurs discover collegiate problem-solvers, help average Joe celebrate invention, and to help little Sue ...and, especially, little Tashanika, to find their hidden, empathy-driven, unfettered, innovation superpowers.
Inductees offered our invention challenges over the screens at hundreds of camps, while our short video montages of years of their collected interviews conveyed their compelling small-girl-on-a-farm-grows-up-to-create stories. Our little team created the copy for the inductee announcements, offered art direction and text for the videos, interactive kiosks, and exhibit spaces, and then crafted curriculum and activities for the very young. My contributions spanned each, with depth and frequency, but I may have enjoyed the most offering up the finger-trap tubes and room-wide navigators to help first graders invent like their new heroes.
This tiny side path we're about to explore in great depth is from my adventures in creating my own National Invention Club for younger humans. Before we dive deep into the thinking throughout that creative journey, please take just a moment to skim some videos from the four primary projects I helped craft with Jen Sitton and Jayme Cellitioci when we weren't making this other fancy stuff for the grown-ups:
A Prototyping Adventure Club
FEELING
A Handful of my Stakeholder Analogies:
Club Direction, Site Dependently --
Cooking dinner for fifty guests, dodging wasps, without a frig or any water, in 100+ weather.
Club Participation -- I'll write Santa a letter, but Pascal and I have our doubts.
Educator systems -- Jujubes.
Industry
Informal Education
Across the Lifespan,
In Invention,
Intellectual Property, and Entrepreneurship
via
Museum Exhibitry,
Events, Competitions,
Summer Camps, and,
In this wee case study,
A National Invention Club
For Children, After School
My Tasks
For this Club I Led:
​
Writing
Content Development
Activity Design
Art Direction
Project Management
Research
Material Selection
Program Assessment
Evaluation
&
Revision
Research
Approaches
LANGUAGE
Hundreds of hours and reels Inventor interviews.
Educator interviews.
Learner interviews.
Text review.
Artifacts, Observation, Narrative.
NUMBER
National data searches.
Literacy Statistics.
​
More
research
IMMERSION
First-hand --
As a child, as an educator.
As a humanities major trying to understand heavy STEM.
As a creative, inventive child who had lost faith in invention as an active, adult, pursuit.
Ethnographic-field.
Vanguard pilots, iterative tests.
That's Not Me
At Invent Now the “tough nut” to crack had been the need to connect children at Camp and Club Invention with the innovation heroes of our time. National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees are among those who have redefined the ebbs and flows of our everyday existence. They've improved human life. They are excellent mentors for young humans.
But a lot of them are dead. They are largely elderly, or deceased, white males, many raised in families of wealth and backgrounds supported by exceptional educations. Scott Volmer, Creative Director, and I felt, the inductee images, in video and poster, do not resonate with every child. The message sent to many through repeated impression is that someone “other than you” is the kind of someone who invents.
Finding Them in the Inventors
Collaborating with the knowledgeable Rini Paiva, I was able to identify the first handful of new go-to paragons. We balanced men with women and selected ladies and gentlemen of color. We found younger inventors from the Collegiate Inventors Competition to include beside the elder. To reflect the diversity of possibility, I felt, we needed to honor that diversity.
Searching for the Seeds of Stories
Next, I searched through hundreds of hours of videotape, links, and texts to find three things:
​
​
Sympathetic Characters
​
That the voice of the particular mentor, like a character in a good story, or a favorite superhero, really resonated…I selected folks with humor, creativity, zest and energy, and great, brilliant enthusiasm for their work, whether their voice was wry and flavorful as Garrett Brown’s or as passionate at Ashok Gadgil’s.
​
​
​
Best Plots
And by far the most important, that the story of the particular inventor held real keys to real invention. I selected the stories that made me shiver, that made me pull out a notebook and start jotting.
​
​
Real Action
​
That the high-level science, technology, and infrastructure represented by these thought leaders, in fields like public key cryptography, directed evolution, water filtration, and solar energy disbursement, had a strong natural fit with the theme of participants’ camp and with the potential for me to create a hands-on activity accurately inviting a similarity of thought process with that of the mentor inventor.
​
​
Storied Seeds: Thriving
All the interviews and articles led me to these tales...
The boy, Nisarg, whose grandmother had to have her painful hip replacement redone twice, who explains how he went on within a handful of years to invent nano-growth factor layers for better bone implants.
The child who was told he was stupid by his teachers and didn’t read until fifth grade who went on to use his complex mathematics to reshape everything.
The team of just-past teens who want to make a motorcycle that can drive any direction, fast and self-balancing, on spheres, and who spent pages debating what color to make it.
The girl who tripped on the subway steps in the Bronx walking across the city alone every morning when she was six-years-old, to make it to the music lessons that bought her a place in a class and made her the Carbon Queen.
​
In these stories, Jim West is crawling under houses working for his cousin when he’s twelve, and taking apart everything he can get his hands on,
​
And Mark Jensen, frustrated that his father’s math-based invention is not being taken seriously, finds a way to automate the making of his IsoTruss, unconsciously mimicking a father-son truss patent team from American history.
​
​
So those, Jim, Nisarg, Millie, were some of the sympathetic characters I'd picked, alongside Yvonne Brill, Stephanie Kwolek, W. Lincoln Hawkins, Lindsay Holiday... With these we have a couple of handfuls of great plots.
Next up, time to weave in real action.
Ok, Ready, Set...In
Stepping Stone 2: Help Someone find their Creative Feet
Authentic invention is creative. One creates something. New.
Give thought to what it means to perform an Authentic Act of Invention. What is that exactly?
There is synthesis involved, from past experience, from knowledge. Maybe from one's personal self. From tech or science with which we're familiar and have experimented. From some artistic impulse or desperate need.
Determine what you would qualify as a real act of synthesis, design-thinking, and invention. Now try to imagine making it accessible, and relevant, for kids in an after-school club... With minimal materials. In minimal available time.
Maximizing the fun out of it.
Task:
Brainstorm a couple authentic acts of invention for little humans at a Club.
NOTE:
By authentic acts of invention, I mean to contrast this from those activities which require less of a participant than their real, creative application: Copying a lab someone else has done. Building a project from parts and instructions. By Authentic, I mean evidencing real creativity.
Finding The Inventors in Them
Digging through interviews to find those paragons with the best chance of inspiring our diverse new innovators, I reaffirmed and, then was surprised by, themes that excite me. Some threads, I feel, of invention:
-
Persistence
-
Excitement
-
A need or discovery
A history of:
-
Trusting your instincts
-
Taking things apart
-
Spending time outdoors
-
Asking good questions
-
Wondering about everything
-
And failing. A lot.
I was wrestling with the question of how to share the info about those threads with the Club attendees. Personally, I like to evoke experiences, rather than tell about them. I like stories that immerse and surprise so that the reader is in the action. Atreyu-style, you know. I kind of hate telling people where they're going until they're ankle deep in golden grasslands and the vista is before them. Have you ever been to a Japanese Tea Garden? Like that. Round the corner, under the gate, and --
There you are.
The intent was to communicate biology and engineering to the attendees. I chose to share design-thinking and these interesting threads of invention, too. The first objective was to synthesize all the stories of the Hall of Fame inventors, but then also to make opportunities for participants to enjoy inventing. I thought a lot about our goals in the Club, and as an organization. Ultimately, I realized I didn't want to tell these kids someone else's story.
So, to do that, I felt someone had to be in hot water. I planned to give the attendees a NEED.
I opted to create a universe mirroring our own in which the inductee tales exist all at once. Here the famous inventors would step from the pages to form living characters in an interactive invention story that our learners played at Club:
I made a hero and heroine: the brother and sister field environmentalists of the future, Axon and Echo. With them, Bubo-the-mechanical-owl-style, I offered the camera bot, Gidge. The wee adventure team was getting itself into cliff-edge scrapes that only the Club participants could fix...
...By teleporting their own new inventions through time-space to be printed at the second of greatest need.
We called this new Club,
Axon and Echo: A Prototyping Adventure.
Axon and Echo:
I wanted the young innovators to live their own origin stories in my Club.
So the task I'd set myself was to tell the inductee stories in such a way as to communicate the inherent:
science design-thinking & threads of invention
I had to avoid the Saturday After School Special. She who talks down to learners has learnt nothing. I believe that a pre-schooler has as much ability to think, wonder, and create well, as any leading innovator. What they require of us is a different translation of the language, the assumption of a smaller experience-set, and additional emotional support. They are also, ideally, accustomed to having a good deal more fun in every activity they undertake. It's a good model to use. The quality of the activity has to surpass the expectations of the child and adult.
I didn't want to tell the story...I wanted it narrated, but then physically experienced. I had to give the participants a chance to simulate the moments of invention, or test out and understand the technology of the inventions.
However, then, finally, too, to let them delve deeper into their own story,
to balance needs, synthesize, and apply.
And I had to recognize that I couldn't know the answer...or there would be no invention happening. I had to lead them to the cliff face, tools in hand, and let them find their ways.
Because Everyone Has a Kitchen
For Garrett Brown, creator of the stadium Skycam® and other tech that enables the filming of movies like Star Wars® and Rocky®, I had offered videography direction from interviews, for montages and Camp challenges. When, thirty minutes in on some track or other, he, the every-man inventor, relayed his moment of puzzling through his approach to the tech behind the Skycam® with some friends at home, I realized I'd hit one of my bits of storyteller gold.
For the kids, I created the challenging game 'Keys in the Kitchen'©:
A practice at maneuvering a key ring around a Club classroom by a team of four to target an objective using two crossed strings hanging from the ceiling, very like the Skycam® rig.
Camp attendees would encounter new bits of tech and moments of discovery each week, and accumulate all the tools from a slew of innovators like Garrett.
My Keys in the Kitchen activity at the National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum demonstrated by Scott Vollmer, Creative Director at Invent Now, Cleveland.com Nov. 11th, 2014
Then, we brought Axon, a character in the interactive story, out on a faulty IsoTruss® tower, and sent additional characters Gidge and Axon's sister, Echo, to his rescue, right at the cliff's edge...with visibility challenges, or endangered flying hazards... something that called for serious adaptation. Club participants had the opportunity to pair Brown's innovation and any they'd encountered on their Club trek, open-endedly, with their own ideas. And all it took were the printed comics, educator scripts, prototyping supplies, a key ring, and some string.
​
Attendees would navigate Gidge and Echo over and under dangers to save the day.
Must be Tuesday.
Application Spotlight: Yaskawa makes Skycam a Football Hero Yaskawa America 2018 You Tube
Application Spotlight: Yaskawa makes Skycam a Football Hero Yaskawa America 2018 You Tube
Application Spotlight: Yaskawa makes Skycam a Football Hero Yaskawa America 2018 You Tube
Why I love It, That Kitchens are Available
There's a reason that the Keys in the Kitchen activity was one of my favorites during that year of Club. There's something very down-to-earth about that way of figuring out the puzzle that perplexed Brown and his friends. To actually take a set of keys, rig them up with string you've taped to your kitchen ceiling... It's a sort of Working Through, the challenge.
I like what Brown teaches people about invention partially because he is such a regular guy. He doesn't view himself as a technologist, a scientist, a researcher on the far-off edge of some fascinating field.
His film equipment came from his struggles with old -- ancient, out of date -- film tech. His extensions and adaptations of the technology, like Dive Cam, came from his imagination. He is very clear about the way NEED, desire, creativity, and persistence... From the articulated hotel room desk lamp to his kitchen escapades... Led him from nothing, to inspiration, to invention.
That's the journey I wanted players of his story to experience.
Translating Into Stories
Stepping Stone 3: Scaling Up, Materials and Mediums
Think now about scale. About the way processes brought to scale don't always fit. The way certain sites lack resources others have.
Tech breaks. Or doesn't exist there at all. WiFi is slow. Internal culture is different.
Now that you've selected some iconic Muses to inspire diverse learners, and imagined how to craft authentic acts of invention for kids at a club, take a moment to puzzle through and polish up the format of delivery at varied sites. It's time to put the icing on that spectacular cake. But also to make sure it makes it to the wedding with beauty and flavor. And utensils. Don't forget utensils.
Determine what materials you'd send learners to use for meaningful prototyping. And then try to decide on a medium for your icons' stories.
What mode or method will tell them best?
​
For the Camps we crafted, we frequently had about a dollar, or maybe up to three, per learner, for supplies.
In a favorite set of activities, I'd love to adapt today, I framed stories of material science and carbon nanotubes for elementary innovators, spending less than a buck, using deco ribbon.
Telling a Story ...Without a Voice
Sometimes the videos don't work. And the educator talks in a monotone. And the participants aren't much readers.
Then, Camp slows way down.
The first time I watched this happen at Vanguard I thought it would be great to try a different approach. I did my homework -- all my homework. Made character profiles and storyboards. Collaborating with the exceptional comic artist, Matt Horak, we tested the waters.
Funding wasn't sufficient to see all my Club Invention stories conveyed by graphic novel, but the main characters got their looks. And I learned valuable lessons about collaborating with skilled artists.
Visual Interest
Visual Interest
A Universally Accessible Podium
One of the inventors had said that he worried that invention, innovation, science, design...they looked unattainable and undesireable, to kids. Like you needed something special to do it. Like it would be cooler to be a football hero. He said innovators should be rock stars and superheroes. That then we'd see real change in the world.
So then the challenge was to strike a new balance: Can you put someone on a podium, while making that podium available to anyone? Football stars are heroes to many. I needed my inventors to be, too. But science, tech...even creativity...those are scary to most. I needed them attainable. I need every girl to know she can be Wonder Woman®.
So, I decided on superheroes, with iconic looks and powers. But superheroes that started out in the everyday world, like Peter, right before he's bitten by that creative bug.
Comic Artist:
Matt Horak
The Story of Mark's Dad
When Mark was very young, his dad told him about his dream. "I want to make things, giant things, strong things, like high towers, out of ribbon, so we don't have to cut down trees to build things!"
"I have found a shape, like math, geometry," he explained to Mark, "that is so strong! You could weave a ribbon into that shape, spray it with some kind of resin, like liquid plastic, that hardens the ribbon when it dries, and then make almost anything out of it! A mountain bicycle you could ride off-road. Electrical poles and towers. It is strong in every direction. The shape can be pushed, pulled, twisted. It stays strong from every angle! It is a cylinder made of triangles; powerful from any which way. That's my dream." He told Mark. "You wouldn't need to dig up steel, and cut down trees, to make things like electrical towers. You could just use a bit of ribbon."
​
​
​
The Story of Mark
Mark was excited about his father's dream. He rather liked the idea that math might be used directly to build big things. But then, Mark's father explained that it was too hard. People felt it would be too difficult to make the shape by hand, again and again, the size of a tower. It would take too much time. It would cost too much. So Mark's Dad won an award for his idea, but it didn't get made.
When Mark got into college, he had an idea for a school project. What's missing? He wondered. What's missing from Dad's idea that would make it work? Mark thought about how you might get a computer to weave the shapes, instead of a person. The way you can get a computer to use a calculator to help you with your math. But how do you tell a computer how to make something? Especially something in the real world? Mark thought and thought...
​
​
​
Nothing but ribbons
Thanks, Matt! You rock.
An Interactive, Inventive, Trading Card Game
As a related project, those same inventor comic pictures were used in an invention-based, informal STEM-learning, trading card game, Gamechangers, which never made production.
Co-invented with Ander Pierce, who structured all the gameplay dynamics, the card lay-out was co-designed with the comic artist, Matt Horak; skilled Graphic Designer, Rory Culbertson, and Creative Director, Scott Vollmer. The gameplay featured a three-dimensional building element, and massive end-game and rule shifts with the play of specific cards, both relatively unique in the card game world. The set represented a survey of modern technology and STEM career fields: from living machines to flash charge buses, with scientists and interns mirroring a variety of physical abilities, ages, genders, disciplinary fields, and colors of skin. Featuring challenges, resources, and sites, such as hackerspaces, the game offers young players a glimpse into a very wide, cool, world. My current company, Viv LLC, will be reaching out to Invent Now to see if we can acquire the rights to Gamechangers and begin playtests and reiterations of our original draft.
Wanna Play? Click to See:
Celebrating
​
​
Our vanguard assessments of Axon and Echo: A Prototyping Adventure evidenced happy, little, humans.
A Good Life Moment for Me:
Two dozen little girls in a dimly-lit,
Church basement care-center in inner-city Ohio,
Jumping up and down to their new rap:
"Go Gidge, Go, go Gidge!"
Every child took home an inductee inventor’s card and had a blank one for themselves and their own invention. The final day of my Club curriculum participants would hold a meet and greet party, selecting their invention persona from the future and introducing themselves to one another to discuss what they “had made” in an imagined past.
Shoulders of Giants
At the end of the quest,
Yvonne Brill, Inanc Ortac, Julio D'Arcy,
Jim West, Whitfield Diffie, the Woz, and all the rest, offer a space to photograph inventions, with a heartfelt
Thank You,
to the Club participants who supported their young friends in their adventures.
The inductee stories had
revived my hope:
Anyone can invent.
Anyone can innovate.
Anyone can recreate the
world they live in.
The systems in which we live were made by people, or by accident, or by organic progressions of context and history.
We're people.
We can plan. We can conspire to develop symbiotic opportunities, to create new contexts, to make history.
I viewed my role at Invent Now as one of empowerment.
I liked it.
It wasn't until Invent Now that I started taking my own invention seriously again, as I hadn't since adolescence.
​
I'm proud of the range and variation of the work I produced at Invent Now, excited to have helped to convey those brilliant stories.
​
It was a thrill to know that people three-feet high benefited at the outset of their creative adventures from the games we designed, just as black-tie-attired professionals walked down red carpets under our montages.
As we completed the content for the year's inductees an exciting opportunity opened up in my home life. My husband was accepted into an elite team of biomimicry learners and offered a grant-funded position to bring the emergent field into the education of the region. I forwarded my resume to the Professor that had helped start the company, Great Lakes Biomimicry.
At GLBio the cultivation of the creative capacity in everyone -- that I had exulted in from Invent Now -- was combined with the twin ideas that nature has wisdom to inspire, and that life-conducive design should always be the bar.
​
I found myself interviewing for a role I would have the opportunity to shape in the following years. Two of my favorite contributions to this vision have been that social-equity must be presupposed by the ideal of life-conducive design. And that, to reach the creative capacity in everyone, a leetle extra design thinking is required.
Transitions
Thanks for exploring this byway with me.