PopUp Play is empowering tomorrow’s engineers, architects and designers by helping kids learn to design and build their own toys. Through our iPad app, the PopUp Play Build Lab, kids explore their digital design curiosity and learn early engineering design and STEM principles by creating custom playhouses like castles, gingerbread houses and rocket ships. Within a few days, PopUp Play delivers a child-sized fiberboard play structure, which can be assembled in minutes to be colored, decorated and transformed into the child’s personal domain and new favorite place to imagine and play. Kid-tested and kid-engineered, PopUp Play brings digital play to life.
Kitchen Overlord is an Austin, TX based small press specializing in nerdy cookbooks from all your favorite fandoms.
What is the common thread in a prehistoric cave painter who utilized a bulge on the wall to be the body of an animal, in Leonardo da Vinci claiming to see whole battle scenes go down on mold stained walls, in tea-leaf readers divining the future based on the shapes created by the leaves found at the bottom of the seeker’s cup, in Rorschach basing a psychoanalytic tool on inkblots, in children the world over pointing at clouds in excitement, in international news agencies regularly featuring a story of someone who has found a resemblance in such media as food, stains, photos of Mars, etc., or in a new field at the intersection of science and design, known as Biomimetics? The answer has to do with a very unique way of seeing, that when practiced, can heighten creativity.
We are inundated with photography all around us—on our screens, in glossy magazines; over at Starbucks, in our best friend’s house. But displayed photography hides the process of curation and leaves us to only digest its intent. Appropriate/Appropriate will study how photographs, especially those of the developing world, are othered and appropriated, positing one-sided viewpoints from communities and corporations, while attempting to explore a middle ground for the future of photography.
The Spark will be Austin serial entrepreneur Gary Hoover’s bricks-and-mortar Austin museum/amusement/experience space devoted to innovation. Visitors to this tourist attraction will be able to “touch the future” by trying and testing cool software and hardware from around the globe, but with emphasis on areas of interest in Austin: art, music, games. It will be a nexus of creativity and highly educational. More can be learned at thesparkaustin.com.
