As the futurist sage that I am, let me tell you: the future is steam-powered. Or, more accurately and hopefully, STEAM-powered. For the uninitiated, STEAM is the more inclusive acronym sibling of STEM: science, technology, engineering, arts and math.
As someone who has always loved both tech and the arts, I am a big fan of this approach to education, work and the philosophy underlying both. I am also super jazzed by recent local events that bolster the potential and importance of STEAM.
Note that there’s plenty of STEAM-y goodness to be had in Waterloo Region. I merely present to you two excellent recent examples. Get out there and explore for yourself!
Last month, Kitchener Public Library launched their new and improved media lab: Heffner Studio. The lab was a pretty cool place before, but it’s downright fancy now. Fortunately, the same awesome and helpful staff are there and have not been replaced by robots. (Or have they…?) You can take a workshop to learn skills, or just dive in and ask for assistance as needed.
While there are plenty of ways to just play in the studio – and the VR rigs are a jolly good time, indeed – what makes it really shine is that it’s even more of a maker space now. There’s an assortment of recording booths, whether you’re working alone, with a friend or with a whole team.
There’s a full-on radio station setup in case you hold a decades-long dream to be Dr. Johnny Fever. (I don’t know what the Gen Z equivalent would be.)
You could become the next big thing in podcasting. True crime remains a hot topic, and to my knowledge there isn’t a top 10-ranked true crime podcast about Waterloo Region. And there are some pretty crazy stories in our region’s history. Check out Waterloo You Never Knew, for example.
You can record music, either digitally produced or with available-to-borrow instruments, then create a slick music video to go with it, complete with special effects. (You can do better than this. Seriously.)
There are several 3D printers for you to build from one of the already-uploaded templates, or bring your own. The library staff have printed a pretty amazing castle with resident dragon to show some of the possibilities, but really, the world is your polymer oyster.
There’s a 3D scanner, too, which will create a template of whatever (within size constraints) you show it, enabling you to manipulate or reproduce the item. Extra cool is that it’s smart enough to detect what part of the scan is your hand holding up the item, and omit that part. Wonder if I can scan my own head…?
This is just scratching the surface of the studio’s opportunities, and if you have no idea where or how to start, no worries! As noted, the staff are super helpful and there are classes for learning all sorts of things.
The best part, thanks to the sponsorships, is that it’s all free for the community to use. You will need a library card to sign up to use various things, but that’s free, too. And really, everyone should have a library card. You can even use it to borrow books. Books are also awesome.
What really gets me excited about the Heffner Studio and classes and everything else going on is the opportunities for kids. My nieces and their friends already play around with making videos on their social media accounts.
Imagine what kind of skills you would have by the time you started a college or university media program, or when you hit the job market, if you started playing around with production at age 10 and had access to the kinds of tools and assistance the library provides.
That kind of application strikes me as a way better use of technical education, skills and creativity than devoting yourself to becoming proficient at using filters to make the perfect impossible selfie.
Moving up to Waterloo and heading outside, last Saturday night saw the return of the nighttime Lumen festival. After a day of rain, the weather cleared and was pretty much perfect for the roaming crowds of families, students and a few glow-collar-bedecked canines who came out to get hands-on and be dazzled by lights, cameras, and a fire-breathing dragon.
There were four zones for a few dozen installations around uptown, which could be experienced in an easily walkable loop ranging from CIGI and the train station, over to Waterloo Public Library, across Waterloo Public Square, and by City Hall and the Button Factory.
There were lines for some of the interactive installations, but they moved quickly. Some of the most popular stops included getting your hands on a potter’s wheel at the Clay and Glass Gallery, making paper lanterns by city hall, or getting your photo taken in The Matrix-inspired “bullet time” or under cartoon-esque blacklighting.
At other installations, like nik harron’s near-psychedelic Monarch, projected onto an outside wall at CIGI, you could pretty much step right up to pluck the strings to make magic happen.
Heavy Meta over in the WPL parking lot wasn’t quite as digital, but the fire-breathing was set to light and musical accompaniment, including, amusingly, ABBA’s Waterloo. And after warming up there, you could blow your mind learning about quantum physics just steps away, courtesy of the Institute for Quantum Computing.
If the kids weren’t quite worn out after all that, the library had a room with video projections, balls and a bubble machine where they could pretty much go wild ‘til they dropped while the grownups sipped hot chocolate.
Whether you prefer to look, listen, dance or build, Lumen is a feast for the senses. Like the Heffner Studio at KPL, it’s the interactivity, especially for kids, that really makes me happy.
Not only can you see what artistic wonders technology can inspire and make possible, by getting hands-on, people – kids especially – can start to understand how they work, and get their own creative juices flowing.
Now, would the kindergarteners who were lighting up the A Warm Hug installation understand how sensors and circuits work immediately? Probably not, but it plants a seed. It helps people learn that technology and media can be as beautiful as they are functional and educational.
I, for one, can’t wait to check out #Lumen2050, to see what the pyjama-clad toddlers who were out enjoying #Lumen2019 have created with their own STEAM power.
