Whiskey, Prohibition and fiberglass—
Large-scale fermentation—
Cycles of invention over 300 years in Lowell, Massachusetts—
Pittsburgh’s distinct jazz sound—
Seattle’s locus as the center of a thriving international gaming market—
These and other details about local places of invention were recently shared by representatives from six Smithsonian Affiliate museums and their community partners as part of a kick-off event for the Lemelson Center’s Places of Invention Affiliates Pilot Project. The Lemelson Center is working with these Affiliate partners on projects that document invention and innovation in their communities. When complete, developed material will be an integral part of an interactive digital map in our exhibition—yet another lens for examining historic and modern communities where people, resources, and spaces have come together to spark inventiveness. The material also will appear on the Places of Invention website where visitors from around the world will be able to comment and add multimedia about their own places of invention. Equally important, POI-related public programs will take place in each Affiliate community.
Participants in the project are:
The day-long workshop on June 15, 2012 at the National Museum of American History was led by Dr. Lorraine McConaghy, a public historian based at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. Affiliate museums and their partners were joined by representatives from Smithsonian Affiliations, the National Science Foundation and the Lemelson Center. Through a series of presentations and brainstorming sessions, Dr. McConaghy taught the group how to research, document, and find an interpretive pathway for a topic that will become part of the Places of Invention exhibition and website when it opens in 2015.“Let’s be reflective,” McConaghy advised. “Think about your topic as an opportunity to engage your community in invention and innovation and inspire people to think of their own place as a place of invention.”
A lively and gregarious discussion provided no shortages of possible topics, such as:
Mass-production of penicillin as just one of the inventions out of Peoria, Illinois’ USDA-NCAUR lab: Behold the mighty “Super Slurper,” the cornstarch-based superabsorbent polymer used in everything from disposable diapers to biodegradable packing peanuts and plastic utensils; protective seed coatings to fuel filters. It’s even used by archivists to dry out waterlogged books and prevent mold.
By close of day, the teams had come up with thought-provoking possible titles: War Ends, Healing Begins: The Rise of Nuclear Medicine; From Field to Function: Agricultural Research in Peoria, Illinois; How Prohibition Spawned Fiberglass: Newark, Ohio, 1920–1933; and Forgotten Pioneers of the Pittsburgh Sound, to name a few. These topics and titles are not set in stone, but the exercise was a valuable one for all of us thinking about how to create the most compelling content for each community.
I’m thrilled to be directing this process as the new Places of Invention Affiliates Project Coordinator. I look forward to sharing this experience with you in a series of blogs written by Affiliate museums, their community partners, Smithsonian Affiliations, and Lemelson staff. I love the work that Smithsonian Affiliations does—I’ve seen first-hand the ways that its programs foster the exchange between Affiliate museums and the Smithsonian, broadening each institution’s reach. I see the Affiliates Pilot Project as an opportunity to take this relationship even further, creating a new model for collaborative co-creation of exhibition content that we hope will extend to another 20 Affiliate museums. As my colleague Monica Smith points out, we are the prototype for the Affiliates Pilot Project. I hope you will join us—sharing your suggestions and comments as we move forward in this inventive process.
