The Tech Museum (Take Two)

Last Friday I was able to make another pilgrimage to the Tech Museum in San Jose, California. Although I only had a little over an hour and the exhibit designer I was meeting with had to leave after just a few minutes to deal with a crisis, I once again left feeling that these exhibits are what GMRI is striving to do and that we should make a concerted effort to learn more about their work.

As a reminder, you use your museum ticket at a scanner at many of the exhibits. Anything you do at the exhibit will then be saved to your own personal web site. To see some of the exhibits I visited, you'll need to go to this site and enter my code, 99000000006660826823 (use cut and paste to make it easy!). Explore around and you can see what I did at the museum.

For example, I took DNA from a bioluminescent jellyfish and inserted it into a bacteria, thereby creating glowing bacteria. I plated out the bacteria and then the staff at the museum took a picture of the glowing bacteria once they had 24 hours to grow (you could also see bacteria at the station that had grown already). This is what it looks like:



Here is a video I shot in January of what the experience at the station is like:


You can also send e-mail postcards from many of the pages you create...a neat feature.

You can also modify the materials you upload at different kiosks around the museum to create your own, personal web site. I did a very lame one as I had to vamoose to a meeting and did not have much time to create (you'll need to be logged in to see the page).

There was also a fun 3-D scan I did of my head, proving exactly how follically challenged I am. You need to be on a PC to view this, however, so tough luck to mac users at this point.

I was not able to get a lot of information from the exhibit designer about the workings of the exhibits but did find out that they:

-develop the exhibits quickly, on the order of 1-2 months (some exhibits take longer)
-many are html based, with Flash video embeds
-people outside the institution develop some of the kiosks (the genetics kiosk was done by some research staff at Stanford in collaboration with The Tech staff).

Bottom line is that we need to learn more about what these folks are doing and how they do it. I know Dana is familiar with their work through AAM but I think it would be great with all the trips we are making as an organization to California to see it for ourselves. Perhaps a pilgrimage for Tom to make some professional connections?