Help Develop a Smithsonian Exhibition
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center bean-bag room, circa 1970s
We at Inventors Digest are working on our July cover story, which explores the importance of design in the product-development process (hey, if you’re an industrial designer, we’d like to hear from you – e-mail [email protected]).
This announcement from the Smithsonian crossed our transom and thought it was worth a mention:
The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History is planning a new exhibition called Places of Invention. The exhibition will explore several questions about creative communities, including:
- What social, psychological, and spatial elements spark creativity?
- How do these elements give rise to places where invention thrives?
- How does collaboration affect innovation?
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The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation is working in collaboration with The Tech Virtual at the The Tech Museum in California. Through a series of design challenges hosted by The Tech Virtual, the Lemelson Center invites the public to develop and prototype design concepts for the Center’s next exhibition about modern and historic “hot spots” of invention and innovation.
The Tech Virtual is a new approach to creating invention and science-based exhibit content for museums using the virtual world of Second Life as a platform for content development, allowing the Lemelson Center to collect fresh ideas and utilize the most innovative tools available.
The public can contribute ideas in one or all of these categories: design an interactive exhibit space that allows museum visitors to model their own place of invention; design an activity that encourages museum visitors to practice collaboration, a key feature of many innovative communities; or use a virtual environment or other design tools to model the contributor’s own place of invention.
