BioTinkering Lab
An on-floor biology lab at The Tech Interactive that earned the 2019 ASTC Leading Edge Award for Visitor Experience for the institution. Romie Kind served as Project Director on the Tech's Health and Biotech exhibitions team.
What it is. A drop-in, demonstration-led extension of the BioDesign Studio model on The Tech Interactive’s floor. The Tech Interactive received the ASTC Roy L. Shafer Leading Edge Award (Visitor Experience, large-institution category) in 2019 in recognition of the lab. The award is institutional, not individual.
The brief. BioDesign Studio was a destination. Visitors had to commit to a long-form interaction. The Tech needed a complementary surface — same content lineage, lower commitment, more frequent staffed activations — that could pull casual visitors into the synthetic-biology floor on a regular schedule.
Our role. Romie Kind was Project Director on the Tech’s exhibitions team, with Local Projects as the interactive design and build partner. The studio’s slice was the lab’s content design and on-floor staffing model: which activities rotated, what the script looked like for a five-minute encounter versus a thirty-minute one, how to keep the demonstrators from burning out on repetition.
Awards
- ASTC Roy L. Shafer Leading Edge Award, Visitor Experience (large institution), 2019. Awarded to The Tech Interactive.
Collaborators
- The Tech Interactive — institutional home and award recipient
- Local Projects — interactive design and build partner
Press and references
Related work
- 2013–2017
BioDesign Studio
A permanent exhibition on synthetic biology at The Tech Interactive. A working biological design lab on the museum floor, with tangible-tabletop microbe simulators, live cell-culture stations, and visitor-runnable design tools.