Connections
Yesterday I got the chance to head out to the New York Hall of Science hoping to gain inspiration from their signage for a museum project I’m working on. Their wayfinding system was effective, but didn’t provide too much enlightenment. The museum offered a nice assortment of hand-on exhibits, many that I had seen elswhere (I think I was spoiled by OMSI and the Exploratorium as a child).
By far the thing that stood out most to me was an exhibition called ‘Connections: The Nature of Networks‘. It deals with many kinds of networks that exist in the world, from rivers to the internet, and the theories behind them. A bit of research shows that it was designed by Jeff Kennedy Associates who has a fascinating (and probably internal) site on the early development of the project.
I was quite impressed with the variety of networks that the exhibit managed to cover. You could see what happened when a break occurred in a power grid, scrub through video showing social interaction of various creatures, and visualize node interaction in a network of ropes and pulleys. Among the other geeky wonders showcased were a giant version of Conway’s Game of Life, Internet Arm Wrestling, and a touchscreen GIS viewer turned exhibit showing the paths of subway, telephone, major roads and cable TV throughout Queens.
My personal favorite installation was a video processor that tracked the paths of visitors through the exhibition space (shown above). It wasn’t the most accurate, but it did a pretty good job and definitely had that “wow, this is cool” factor. You could scrub through about 5 minutes of path history with a trackball and switch between the path-only view and a live video feed from the cameras above the space.
The first thing that came to mind after seeing this exhibition was a session at barcamp that I didn’t get to go to but wish I had entitled “Spreading the Meme: How people get into hacking. How can we get get more to start?“. Connections: The Nature of Networks seemed that it could be quite effective as a step towards this goal of getting kids interested in technology and networking.
Thanks for pointing this out to me, Reid. Wish I was in NYC to see it! I think education (especially K-12 education) could stand to take some lessons from museums and computer games in how to allow kids to engage with their content (although I do wish museums would stop taking so many cues from television commercial, as all glitz and little substance is never a good thing).
‘Course, the other easy way to get kids interested in networking is to introduce them to online social networking, and gradually move towards letting them manage (and then perhaps build) their own networking software/communities.
Comment by Mel Chua — October 29, 2006 @ 8:31 pm