BD Can I ask a clarification. When you say it was important to ask all the people who are those people?
HW All the staff of Techniquest. Not, not going out beyond the staff of Techniquest because, yeah, I mean, it might be somebody within the staff of Techniquest who knew somebody outside who could do this and this would be a great idea for an exhibit but you always need somebody on the staff so you can go back to them, and, you know, they, they can clarify.
We did have, back in phase 1 we had a, a guy, a professor of zoology who described this thing, drew all the pieces for us, and we built it and it didn't work and he was "Well, you know, I always wondered whether that would work or not." And it didn't. You know, there was no accountability in it, he'd had one of his ideas tried out for free for us. The fact it left us in the lurch didn't matter. So, it's quite important the person involved was someone on the staff was, was responsible.
But I mean, the way in which those ideas came it, it was. The reason for the form, or one of the main reasons for the forms was, to, again bridge gaps between the guys in the workshop and the, the education staff who were suggesting these things. So one of the guys in the workshop would say, you know "there's a new component in the Radio Spares catalogue it's absolutely fantastic! If I do this this and this with it it'll be the greatest exhibit we've ever made." "But what are the educational outcomes of that exhibit?" "I dunno, they'd have a good time." You know, where's that going? Then, you have the education group who are looking at the National Curriculum making sure that we cover it effectively for schools and we've got something on every area and they just want an exhibit on "Bloggs" effect. They don't know what it is, they don't know how it does it or how it's built or how it goes together. So you have these two things coming in from, not polar opposites but, quite a way away. And you have to, have a space on the form, so that the person who wants to cover an educational outcome will have to say "well you do it like this this and this." Doesn't matter how close their idea is, it's important that they consider it cause otherwise they won't understand the difficulties that come later in making it. And similarly the person who, knows exactly how to make it have got to think "well what's it for? What's the outcome? What are we getting out of this?"
So there's, you know, it's a culture bridging sort of thing and the main medium for doing that was that they would, the cards would come in on - written longhand on a form, and then I would put the forms into the computer and, you know, as you putting them in you notice "oh well these two are the same, if I just tweak that one there then those two fit together, hey I've got something that'll get lots of points and - be more likely to go forward." But it also gave me a mechanism, so I could look at the, exhibits we were building in terms of the curriculum topics they covered, in terms of the ambience that they gave to the exhibition, whether they were, contemplative or frantic and from the point of view of planning the work through the workshop, whether they were easy moderate or difficult.
One of my mistakes was to put too many of the difficult ones in at the start. So you begin to, yeah, "it's taking a long time" and they're thinking "160 exhibits, 2 exhibits a month, for 2 years" etc etc and then all of a sudden they look at the progress and we've only built one in the first 3 months and, you know, big people begin to panic so you have to throw in some easy ones, to get the ticks in the boxes. But, yeah, and for light relief cause quite often if you're doing a difficult one it's good to stop doing that one and to do another one so that your brain can get round to sorting out the solutions.