While playing with ice balloons, robotic sensors and sound, the idea came up: What if one could lick a Popsicle embedded with a sensor to show how our bodies conduct electricity?
When a young welder saw someone with a digital camera taking pictures using a lens with shallow depth, she grew obsessed with making a viewer - using a wooden box, mirror, and lens - that turns real life images to miniature size.
Behind the scenes at the Exploratorium, San Francisco's museum of art and science, are a handful of artists and scientists who have created the Tinkering Studio, a small and ambitious space where visitors can tinker away on their own projects, whether by soldering and spot-welding, creating LED-based jewelry, dissecting discarded mechanical toys and making something new, or engineering large-scale chain reaction devices.
The Tinkering Studio, conceptualized in 2008 to give visitors a chance to learn about science and art by "thinking with their hands," now attracts about 15,000 people a year. It is being used as a prototype for programs in museums across the globe - from Berkeley to New York, South Korea to Canada.
Started by two teachers, the five-person core team boasts a doctor in neuroscience and a MacArthur grant recipient. They are welders, birders and magicians, and create inventive and interactive displays. Situated across from the cafe inside the Exploratorium, the Tinkering Studio is a place where visitors can build, hack and invent. Above all, it is a place where the process is considered much more interesting than the end result.
"It's kindergarten for adults," said Mike Petrich, who co-founded the studio with Karen Wilkinson, his partner in work and life. Petrich and Wilkinson, both 44, met 20 years ago, as undergraduate students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He taught her to use computers; she taught him to weld.
"In 1999, Karen and I came out to the Exploratorium to teach a two-week class, and they told us to stick around for a couple of months," laughed Petrich, whose black Lab, Luke, accompanies them to work. "We started by removing much of the technology and replacing it with low-tech tools and materials."
The biggest draw of the Tinkering Studio is the wall of peg boards, billed as the world's largest marble track. It's where tracks can be made using wood, 1/4-inch dowels, funnels, broccoli bands, and all kinds of tubing for all kinds of configurations.
The studio also invites educators to attend "Tinkering 101" courses, to learn things such as mechanical toy dissection, marble runs, and circuit exploration. The tinkerers have exported their mix of whimsy and science to everyone from engineers at MIT to the Dalai Lama's monks in India.
Walter Kitundu, 38, a tinkerer who won a MacArthur Fellowship award in 2008 for inventing a class of musical instruments called phonoharps - stringed instruments incorporating a record player - said, "I love my job every day. I'm a cog for artistic direction. The people who work here are really good at what they do. They take their work seriously, but not themselves."
"The tables and the furniture of the Tinkering Studio is something I came up with," added Kitundu, a hobbyist bird photographer who recently spent six months documenting the life of a red-tail hawk in Alta Plaza Park and has a giant interactive bird mural on permanent display at San Francisco International Airport.
"I try to shy away from things where I already know the end result," Kitundu said. "I take on projects I feel like I can do, but may not know how to do. It's how I've made my way through life. We are kind of lucky in that we get to play around with things and mess around with things all day."
Kitundu is now working on designs for the Tinkering Studio's future site at the new Exploratorium, to open on Pier 15 in 2013. The studio will be larger, with more tinkering exhibits and works by international artists. It will be situated directly across from the museum's workshop, allowing visitors to construct and experiment at the same time staffers are building and experimenting.
"What's so great about the Tinkering Studio is that you are having a conversation with the materials," Kitundu said, recalling that the first thing he made as a kid was a case for his record player. "I've seen how people have a lot of opinions about failure. We see it as you have found a way not to do it. You figure out a way to problem solve."
Several of the Tinkering Studio's tinkerers started as "explainers," volunteers in a three-year program who help visitors navigate the exhibits and do their own creating.
Nicole Catrett, who grew up in Austin, Texas, and just turned 30, worked as an explainer before being hired for the machine shop. She joined the tinkering group a year ago. One of the greatest compliments she hears is that she's a "crack welder."
Catrett makes eye-popping exhibits, including light and color displays, and created a stroboscope camera from simple materials and a toy motor. She has collaborated with fellow tinkerer Ryan Jenkins on a musical bench, and built the telescope that makes everyday life look like a miniature animated scene.
Another tinkerer who started as an explainer is Luigi Anzivino, 36, who is from Bologna, Italy, and has a doctorate in neuroscience.
"The way I used to think about education is that you learn from people who are smarter than you," he said, sitting in the Tinkering Studio, where several young explainers were being trained. "Here, the philosophy is that whatever you come up with on your own is truly valuable, and the important thing is to take charge of your path."
Anzivino has helped build the studio's website and document the tinkering.
"I was here for two weeks and the time just blew my mind," he said. "I think that the philosophy here ultimately leads to better science."
Looking at the marble tracks being made by explainers, he said, "You own the experience and the process. What was lacking for me in all of those years of school was a joy of learning. It always felt like a duty. Here, learning is fun."