USA has nearly completed the design and prototyping process for three new exhibits for Discovery Place.

Discovery Place (DPI) awarded this project to USA because of our demonstrated skill in turnkey exhibit design and fabrication. While USA had worked with Discovery Place previously, they took particular notice of our work on the Flying Machine at the Please Touch Museum. This exhibit represented the sort of “free play” and innovation that Discovery Place is striving to achieve with “Think It Up.”

USA’s prototyping process is an opportunity for play as well. We foster a process of listening and brainstorming with the client prior to drawing or even prototyping. USA acts to advise according to our past experience and challenge and test what is possible in “exhibit physics.” We also provide recommendations on construction techniques and materials to address safety and maintenance issues.

Prototype of the Air Sculpture exhibit

Reviewing the performance of the Air Tower

The “Think It Up” gallery will include two launcher stations modified to suit DPI’s space and with a third arm to support it as a moveable tripod structure. This is the third version of this launcher USA has built. The first was for the Columbia Memorial Space Science Learning Center. Lifting from our past work is one way we bring value to our customers, by repeating successes we ensure a well-designed exhibit and manage budgets at the same time.

The other two exhibits, Air Sculptures and Air Tower, are where we really had some fun. The main components of each are: an air delivery system and a play material.

Our prototyping objective for “Air Sculptures” is to design an air delivery system for a tabletop work station where visitors can inflate and deflate free-form vertical soft sculptures. The air system, comprised of multiple muffin fans and a blower, designed by USA may eventually be used by Discovery Place to develop a “Build Your Own” Air Sculpture programmatic activity.

The air sculptures are crafted from ripstop nylon. The central sculpture is permanently placed while an adjacent bin is full of smaller sculptures which visitors can move and place on positioning rings on top of the muffin fans.

The Air Tower is a clear tube with an opening at the table base for visitors to “launch” paper shapes. USA uses whatever we have hanging around to get started – years of exhibit work means we have scrap material to play with for rapid prototyping. We tested with different sizes of acrylic and Sonatube to see what diameter and length maximized the floating or flying of the objects. DPI wanted to design to reuse existing materials for a new purpose; this led to the testing of phone book pages as the building material for visitor’s flying objects.

Discovery Place’s focus on fun in the development process is not unstudied; their understanding of their visitors and learning feeds every decision they make.

This permanent exhibit opens to the public April 17th.

Please check back with USANews for more information on our other in-process design-build projects, a traveling exhibit about bivalves for the Museum of the Earth and the Central Pennsylvania Convention and Visitors Bureau.