DesignIT Studios Displays Student Projects at Radioshack Flagship Store

DesignIT Studios is an outside of school program run by the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. It immerses teens from two Boys & Girls Clubs and a middle school in two years of creative design with information technology. So far, we have introduced more than one-hundred teens to technology as a tool of invention rather than as a product to consume. The teens create artistic IT projects using laptops, digital cameras, craft materials, microcontrollers, and power tools. The projects that the DesignIT teens produce are compelling. Radioshack liked them enough to display them during the ribbon-cutting ceremony of its flagship store. Seven kinetic sculptures decorate the rotunda of the new store, responding to changing light and the movement of visitors.

EHR/ESI 2005 Program Officer: Michael R. Haney NSF Award Numbers: 0322665 Award Title: DesignIT Studios PI Name: Chip Lindsey; Co PI: Kit Goolsby, Joyce Baker, Kevin Foster Institution Name: Fort Worth Museum of Science & History

Robin Reardon, the designer of StoreOne, had worked with the president of our Museum back in her Imagineering days with Disney. She was looking for an appealing way to use the front display area of the store and called Van Romans for ideas. Van suggested the kinetic sculptures. They turned out to be a good fit since they are full of RadioShack connectors and parts. Van had first seen the sculptures at the end of a summer workshop with guest presenters from the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The original sculptures were built to provide a light-sensitive soundtrack to a scratch animation film. More were built throughout the year as the idea evolved. Thirty of the sculptures wound up as centerpieces in the Museum’s fund raising gala, “The Mad Scientist’s Ball.” When the Radioshack request came, a group of DesignIT teens designed new kinetic sculptures and built them over the course of a spring break. The new sculptures were installed in time for the grand opening of the flagship store downtown Fort Worth. They remained on display throughout the summer of 2005.