SMART IRELAND
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“They exhibited first in Dublin and
went on to the World Science Festival in New York where they raised €25,000 through a crowd funding campaign allowing them to implement the project in villages in Kenya.” A number of projects first introduced
in the Science Gallery in Dublin have toured to various locations to date, including Canada, Russia (a gaming exhibition in Moscow involving Steve Collins, co-founder of Havok) and Italy. One project that simulated how an epidemic works came to the Science Gallery four days before the Swine Flu crisis broke in 2009. The project essentially represented a digital epidemic using radio frequency identification tags to show how people can infect each other and how something could spread throughout the gallery through the course of a day. “The timing was coincidental and
attracted interest from the media. The researchers went on to develop the project as a system for hospitals, establishing that nurses are the most dangerous infection pathway,” Gorman explains. “A lot of ideas are tried out for the
Experimenting with liquid nitrogen at Elements, which explored the beauty of chemistry
‘Our vision for our global network is to create a sustainable model that benefits from the sharing of exhibitions and ideas. The level of collaboration required is significant’
first time in the Science Gallery with the potential to have a broader impact in the world. We crowd source ideas around big themes such as contagion and the future of life, and a whole range of projects are proposed from the world of design, the arts and research.” Helping to shape the themes is the Leonardo Group, a group
of 50 people drawn from research, industry, the creative sphere and media who work with the gallery for a two-year term.
“Members of the Leonardo Group help to distribute our open
calls for proposals and are sometimes involved in curating exhibitions, mentoring and helping us to select projects for exhibitions,” explains Gorman.
A FUNNEL FOR FEEDBACK “For the projects involved, the exhibitions provide a wonderful opportunity for feedback – a normal incubator-type project wouldn’t have the exposure of 300,000 members of the public moving through the space every year. We are not actually an incubator but play an important role within that ecosystem.” The Green Machines exhibition in 2010, exploring the
potential of green technology and sustainable design, was particularly effective in terms of generating useful feedback. Each visitor was given a fictional €5m
to invest in ideas from electric vehicles to bamboo bicycles and hydroponic vegetables and venture capitalist from Delta Partners Shay Garvey was also on hand to ‘invest’. A questionnaire was designed to
assess whether the technologies were disruptive and whether there was a market for them, as well as their impact on carbon footprint. “Sixteen year olds had debates about
which technology would have the most impact and Irish wave energy company Wavebob won the Green Machines Award 2010. The creators of all of the projects were able to harness all of that feedback as they had access to visitors’ notes and comments on what they thought of each of them,” Gorman explains. Another way the Science Gallery
fosters innovation is through its 12-week Idea Translation Lab course, which aims to provide science, humanities and art undergraduate students with the opportunity of collaborating and creating projects together.
The Invisible Eye at Illusion, which explores the neuroscience and physics of illusions
Issue 7 Autumn/Winter 2013 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW 27
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