Kids Want to be Programmable Matter

“Art is a lie that helps you get at the truth,” artist Shane Hope said at "Facts and Fiction: Discussing Science in Imaginary Worlds" at Science House this week. “Cheating is when you create a shortcut.”

Shane took out his iPhone to share his own art with the room. His pieces appear to have been created by children from the future deadpanning the reality of their splintered digital lives.

“The singularity came too late for mom and dad,” Shane read off the small screen, pausing for a split second. “Your mom is open source.” He looked around the room. “Kids want to be programmable matter.”

Maker in the USA: Scott Carpenter

Many years ago, in another lifetime, it seems, I was in a restaurant in Cooperstown, New York, where I began my career as a journalist. I spotted a beautiful drawing entitled "Ava, Missouri." I asked about the artist and the owner of the restaurant said, "You have to interview him." He led me to a glass door through which an art studio was visible, small and bright from all the windows. The artist was not present but his spirit was revealed by the arrangement of his tools and supplies. The afternoon sun highlighted his neatly spooled thread.

I soon returned to visit the artist, Scott Carpenter (shown above). I realized he was the Person Doing Something I'd been spotting around town, cutting across the parking lot between the laundromat and Doubleday Field, visible from my kitchen window. He was always carrying a leather portfolio or cardboard tubes or some other accoutrement that could only belong to a Person Doing Something. I often wondered what, and this was my chance to find out.

We sat together in his small, golden, windowed studio, surrounded by trees and peered into by the occasional passersby. He held up a blue and gold sneaker that he'd made and told me how he'd felt as a child when people were literally getting killed over Air Jordan sneakers. He had started a story that would take him a couple of years to finish telling me in full. The gist for our purposes today: Scott Carpenter was on a mission to see his custom hand-made gloves used by professional baseball players.

The market, Carpenter noted, is dominated by large corporate brands who have a tight grip on players who are paid to wear their logos. His plan was to change that. His beautiful drawing of Ava, Missouri depicted the town in which the Rawlings factory is located. He explained his complex journey to understanding corporations and brands.

It was through my relationship with Scott Carpenter that I started to develop awareness of some aspects of the brute force of multinational corporations (which became the main focus of my journalistic work along with the nuclear industry).

Cooperstown, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, was the obvious place to set up shop. The town is steeped in baseball.

The Ultimate Diamond
When I got a note from Scott this week to let me know that his dream had become a reality, I cried.

"Cooperstown is known for its history and for preserving the rich traditions of baseball," Scott said. "However, this is an account of a Cooperstown local breaking with tradition and pioneering a trend that will shape how baseball is played in the future."

His gloves are being used in major league baseball! Brian Gordon is the first player ever to use a non-leather glove in major league baseball. Ever since Doug Allison first wore a glove in 1870 all major league baseball gloves have been made with leather. Until now.

Gordon used this groundbreaking glove on June 16, 2011 as the starting pitcher for the New York Yankees against the Texas Rangers. Gordon converted to pitching after spending his first ten years as an outfielder.

He says of his Carpenter glove, “For the first time in my career I felt comfort and control on the field. I love it.” Gordon was born in West Point, NY and he is the only NY player using a glove made in NY.

The idea of a non-leather baseball gloves defies expectations of the traditional smell and feel of glove leather, Scott said. However, synthetic materials have already been a growing trend for several years. Star players such as Roy Halladay and Alex Rodriguez have already been using gloves that have some synthetic parts. Synthetics offer greater strength than leather while also being remarkably lighter. Carpenter synthetic gloves average 10 ounces lighter than comparable leather gloves, giving players a considerable performance advantage where speed is essential. Carpenter gloves are the lightest gloves used in professional baseball today.

Carpenter’s alternative approach to his business is as unique as his innovative baseball gloves. Scott Carpenter has never paid players and has never done any advertising or marketing beyond his website: CarpenterTrade.com. He makes all Carpenter gloves himself. The baseball glove is an American icon; Carpenter is proud to be the only glove brand used in major-league baseball that has never imported, never outsourced, and has always produced their own gloves in the USA.

A New Chapter for the Imagination Age: Science House

The view, from any perspective, is always spectacular from Science House.

In February, I gave a talk about the Imagination Age at Science House in NYC. Something happened that night. I haven’t told you about it in detail yet, in part because the arc of the story is so wide that every time I start I realize I can only tell a part of it.

So here are the basics--starting that first night.

Science House has a banquet table laden with sushi, chocolate and refreshments, set amid river-to-river views of Manhattan, with a set of binoculars on the wide windowsill. Those binoculars magnify the details of the urban landscape and the people who inhabit it so much that when I tore myself away I couldn’t tell which of the endless glittering windows, restored to their regular distance, held the lives of the peered-upon.


I put the binoculars down and took a seat next to Katelan Foisy, who extended me the invitation. We went around the room to introduce ourselves. In such situations, in a room full of strangers, I sometimes mention other facets of my work or life but I always say that I work toward a new global culture and economy in the Imagination Age.

This work has been developed individually and collaboratively by me and my collaborator Joshua Fouts. We have spent our entire careers and lives, in some way, shape or form, researching and exploring the most effective platforms, structures and core ideas on which to build a new global culture and economy.

When the founder of Science House, James Jorasch, introduced himself to the group, I learned that in addition to being a highly accomplished inventor, he’s a memory and chess champion and an improv comedian. The provocative conversation that evening was further bewitching, and I was done in by grasshopper brownies created for our pleasure by the Insomnibaker (AKA Megan Kingery, Science House Director of Operations).

As the night went on I realized that Science House successfully practices a complementary path to a new global culture (with science as a neutral foundation) and economy (by developing a strong global network and funding early stage science, technology and math startups). Additionally, the Science House Foundation works to spark the imaginations of kids all over the world by making science and math exciting.

Even the coasters at Science House are on a mission.

Longtime readers of the Imagination Age, or those of you who found us through the Imagination project, can imagine how excited I was to discover imagination at the heart of Science House. In subsequent conversations with James, it was evident that we were going to be working together...but in what capacity? If I went to work for Science House, my ongoing collaboration with Josh would have been cut short. Proving yet again that timing is everything, Science House’s first employee, the wonderful Gabi de Wit, decided to pursue her PhD and would no longer be running Science House Foundation.

I am now the Executive Vice President for Business Development at Science House and Josh is now the Executive Director of Science House Foundation. Science House never sleeps (and neither do I, which I now know since James handed me some equipment and advised me to start tracking my sleep cycles. But that’s another story).

The eight-year old me who learned about quarks when her father took her to his physics class at Columbia University is overjoyed that the story has gone in this Science House direction. Also, we have toys. Lots and lots of toys. And magnets.

James has noted the serendipity of finding not just one but two new members of the Science House team who already work together. I feel the same way about having found James, Megan and the rest of the Science House family. The rapport has been natural from the start. We have a lot of motivation to keep it this way--the kids whose imaginations get sparked today may grow up to start startups of their own.


In addition to the usual mix here at the Imagination Age, stay tuned for cross-posts from Inside Science House, snippets from my sleep diaries, videos of kids and robots and glimpses of the world through the lens of a microscope.

Thanks for being an ongoing part of this adventure!

Kevin Slavin: "Twelve Reasons to Keep the Naked Eye Naked"

Kevin Slavin gives a really compelling speech from a recent appearance in Amsterdam at the Mobile Monday talks. It sets the stage for reframing how we perceive the world especially in and around the current media excitement around Augmented Reality. It's an incredibly engrossing presentation that takes us from World World II radar translators who had to transcribe images backward to Piaget to uncorking the fallacy of how the movie The Terminator emphasizes the eye instead of the brain and on.

You should watch it.

Communicating Science

Rita J. King has a new post on the Science House blog about Alan Alda's work teaching improv to scientists to help them better communicate their craft:

For over a decade, Alda has hosted Scientific American Frontiers. After interviewing over 700 scientists, he rejects the myth of the lone mad scientist in a lab coat. Scientists want to communicate their passion and work with the public, he contends–but they need to learn how.
He didn’t know much about science at the beginning but was “extremely curious in a freewheeling, completely improvised way.” Mostly, he would listen and ask questions, trying to get at the heart of the issue: How can scientists communicate with each other when words often mean different things within different fields, much less with the public at a time of rampant anti-intellectualism?
Clarity, vividness and personal anecdotes create a connection with the audience.

[Science House: "The Public and Science: A Blind Date" by Rita J. King]

GAMEFUL Challenge

Sometime last year, I became the first Gameful Fairy of Jane McGonigal's "GAMEFUL, a Secret HQ for Worldchanging Game Developers" platform when I supported it on Kickstarter. In exchange, I would eventually get to establish an official Gameful Award, Challenge or Scholarship to bestow on the recipient(s) of my choice anytime in 2011, up to $1000 to support their ongoing efforts to make awesome games that change the world.

That time has come.

Today, I received a note from Jane McGonigal:

"Hello gameful fairies! WE HAVE AN URGENT MISSION FOR YOU. It's time for YOU to launch YOUR gameful challenge."

When I became a Gameful Fairy I knew the theme of the challenge I came up with would be related to science and the arts in education. I want to create the challenge collaboratively, however. For your review, here are links to three other challenges:

Operation End Boredom

Three Missions of Kindness

Make Lord Kelvin Proud

GAMEFUL says, "You can choose -- do you want to honor a game developer working to improve health? to be played on public transportation? to connect kids with their grandparents? to fix education? to help people dance more? to make a game for the city you live in? Your choice, your award -- YOU get to be the Gameful fairy. You will be honored by name, or anonymously, or on behalf of any corporation or organization -- with an optional photograph or a logo -- as you wish."

I would love to hear from you if you have any ideas about a challenge that comes with a $1000 prize related to the arts and sciences in education. Please pass the link along to educators, friends, parents, kids, game developers, anyone you know who might be able to think up a magnificent challenge. Thanks in advance!