Museum Of Science

Exhibit Technical Design

I work as part of a team of designers to conceptualize, design, and fabricate exhibits and products for the Museum of Science in Boston. I handle the technical aspects of our productions: 3D modeling, microcontroller programming, machining, welding, wood working, custom circuitry, CNC fabrication etc. This page is a small sampling of the projects I've worked on for the past couple years. (2012- present)

Design Challenges Exhibit: Drop Zone

Kinematics, elasticity, engineering design, and golf all in one interactive! Visitors build a trampoline around a frame with hair ties, rubber bands and cloth, test their design in our measurement unit, and then try to make it better.

I developed the system that measures the time of flight of the golfball as it bounces, and reports the calculated height apex of the trajectory to the visitor.

Technology Spotlight Exhibit: Daktari

Part of the mission of the Museum of Science is to convey scientific advancements in a manner that everyone can understand. The Daktari interactive exhibit challenged us to do just this. Daktari Diagnostics in collaboration with Continuum Innovation created a CD4 tester that is the size of a lunchbox. To showcase one of the many innovations that helped make this feat of engineering possible, we produced an interactive exhibit that demonstrates a mechanical analogy to how white blood cells are filtered out from red blood cells in Daktari's CD4 tester.

We used magnets placed along the back of an aluminum channel to pull steel ball bearings (silver color) away from plastic balls (red color). The angle of the channel determines the flow rate, and therefore the ratio of balls captured to balls missed.

CREATING MUSEUM MEDIA FOR EVERYONE (CMME)

The Creating Museum Media for Everyone (CMME) project aims to develop toolkits for universal design. As part of a team of team of four organizations including the Museum of Science, WGBH National Center for Accessible Media, Ideum, and Audience Viewpoints, we attempted to push the boundary of haptic interfaces to benefit the visually impaired.

It seems like every dynamic haptic technology available today is either extremely costly or too hackneyed to be worth investigating. Though our version of a haptic display rode on a meager budget, I was still able to produce a few pieces to test with our visitors.

The general idea for this specific project was to generate a touchable physical representation of a graph of data. The ability to compare between multiple graphs was an additional priority, and so this machine needed to be dynamic and proportionally controlled to a certain resolution in order to generate different touchable graphs.