Michigan State University
IN-24: Innovation A

The science gallery is an award-winning global traveling network that partners with Universities to bring an infusion of science and art together to young people. Science Gallery focuses on finding wicked problems and exploring unique ways for citizens to intersect with the environment to solve them. Science Gallery Lab partnered with the MSU Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology and the city of Detroit to create their first gallery in the United States. The gallery engaged academics and students at MSU through collaboration at all levels of the university. Student, staff, and faculty had the opportunity to submit different types of interactive works to have on display at the gallery; this provides a new avenue for researchers to engage the public. Students help run the gallery by becoming trained mentors in the stories, themes, and science content of the exhibits. They are there to create an active dialogue with the community members who attend. Student from the MSU School of Planning, Design, and Construction who were enrolled in the course PDC 491 worked on a project called DesignThink associated with Science Gallery. The students were mostly Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design Students. DesignThink had two parts; first they chose a park, plaza or land parcel in Downtown or Midtown Detroit and envisioned the property with the tools of landscape architects and urban designers, and second, they worked for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Belle Isle, as part of the MSU Student Parks Project, and envisioned a cultural area at the park with a focus on the horse stables and formal gardens to meet their aesthetic, functional and environmental needs. The learning outcomes for this course are categorized into four categories: Live, Learn, Work, and Play. For Live, analyze the existing social and natural networks of Downtown, Midtown, and nearby neighborhoods. Learn, blend skills across the team to compose a visual story and create a learning environment in which all involved are co-learners. Work, create a plan for sustainable site development, and communicate design through graphic mediums. Play, communicate seamlessly across professional, national, age and gender barriers and demonstrate understanding of the needs of Detroit’s businesses and governmental bodies in their designs. The partnership created a pop-up gallery that explored the different interpretations of survival and success in an exhibition called Hustle. Science Gallery was free to all those who attended and if the exhibition you were there to see requires traveling to another building the transportation was provided at no cost. Science gallery’s goal is to spark an enthusiasm within the young Detroit community members in science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Through vast outreach the exhibition attracted more than 10,000 community members with a wide variety of demographics. Hustle explored survival and success through multi-media exhibits that focused on social equity, economic disparity, and economic and social justice. The works that are featured in the exhibits came from artists and researchers around the global, from San Francisco, California to Budapest, Hungary. Some exhibits, such as Ecomimesis, explored the evolutionary relationship between humans and non-human species, by looking at how plants have been able to adapt and thrive in highly challenging environments. Another exhibit, Power Plants: Industry 4.0 for Trees, investigated how global warming is rapidly changing our planet. The artist wanted people to broaden their outlook to see how ecology could play a part in global capitalism. Another artist explored the dependence humans have on fossil fuels through his art work called Super Major, which detailed how many humans have a frighteningly dependent relationship with material objects through our relationship with fossil fuels. In the exhibit Love Motel for Insects: Science Gallery Lab Detroit Variation, insects were explored as having a major role in our food systems, and the exhibit discussed why we should treat them as “superheroes”. In addition to the exhibits, there were workshops and speakers that focused on different topics, such as a short film on gentrification, mental health, and success, a workshop on what technologies, products, and systems in the future will be like, and a session on colony collapse disorder with founders of SW Beetroit. Science Gallery’s next exhibition in Detroit is going to be called Depth and will explore water, taking place in the summer of 2019.

https://hub.msu.edu/science-gallery/ https://www.sciencegallery.org/network https://detroit.sciencegallery.com/hustle