Mechanical Storytelling is a contemporary automaton depicting an animated scene and featuring a clown character with a unique personality. My focus in this work is the creation of mechanisms that are appropriate to the animations necessary for giving personality and “life” to this wooden object.

Pockets-Full-of-Wonder gets today\’s child, the Digital Native, playing outdoors! Seeing possibilities for play, children fill their pockets with gadgets that help make nature comes alive. Instinctively, the kids gather materials — a manipulated photograph, a pressed leaf, water quality data from a stream — that can be used in a Do-It-Yourself Kit project. Before they know it, they are teaching their friends how to make a handmade book, print or data visualization.

In another DIY Kit, children tackle the challenge of making their own wired field gadgets. With eGadgets that act more like a ball, a stick and a cardboard box than an iPod or iPhone, children invent modern twists on good old-fashioned games like hide-and-seek. An online interface gives them a place to share their accomplishments, helps them make things and download local programming.

Kids drive the experience with little intervention from adults. The range of possibilities will tempt even the most apathetic and squeamish child. Interpretive staff, teachers and parents see the system as an antidote to the adverse impacts of pervasive technology. Pockets-Full of Wonder makes a child see nature as their playground.

With mock-ups and simulations I made of the system parts, children, parents and teachers have helped me complete the define and discover phases of this design project. Next steps in the design process include, among other tasks, prototyping fully functional eGadgets and programming DIY project templates.