Written by Guest Artist Contributor: Ricky Chng
“From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know more, we have achieved it most effectively not by removing ourselves from the world to ponder and theorize, but rather by getting our hands dirty and making careful observations of real stuff. In short, we have learned primarily by tinkering.”
― Curt Gabrielson, Tinkering: Kids Learn by Making Stuff
After a visit to The Tinkering Studio at Science Centre Singapore, I was inspired to tinker my pop-ups from the huge display of tools at the workshop area. A thought popped up: what if every home could have a tinkering garage in the room so that the child can get his or her hands dirty tinkering? By making the tools visible and accessible in the room,it invites the child to do tinkering as part of his or her daily activities. After a series of idea exploration, I came up with the following design – TGEH (Tinkering Garage in Every Home) version 1.0 and version 2.0.
TGEH Version 1.0
Design Considerations
In developing the design concept, I came up with the following criteria so that it can be replicated in every home:
- The design should require minimum modification to the wall
- The material and accessories are off-the-shelf
Design Concept
The design involves modifying the IKEA BILLY bookcase (80cm wide version) using wire nets. As shown in Figure 1, wire nets are mounted onto the top part of the board for the bookcase using cable ties. Behind the bookcase, the board (where the wire nets are mounted) is reinforced with duct tapes to take additional loading of the tools hung on the wire nets. Wire nets are also attached to the two side walls so that all the available walls within the bookcase are utilised for hanging the tools for tinkering. The lower three tiers can be used to display work in progress, books and material on the tinkering topic that the child is exploring. For my tinkering exploration, it related to paper engineering so the three tiers in Figure 1 were stuff that I use to explore pop-ups. Additional book shelves can be mounted on the lower part of the bookcase to further categorise the resources as the shelves for the top part of the bookcase are not utilised.
Figure 2 shows a close-up of the top part of the bookcase. There are four wire nets mounted onto the board of the bookcase. Hooks and metal baskets are attached onto the wire nets to hang the tools for tinkering. Toolboxes holding additional tools can be placed on the shelf.
TGEH Version 2.0
TGEH Version 2.0 is the same as Version 1.0 except it comes with the two IKEA OXBERG panel/glass doors as shown in Figure 3. The doors help to keep dust away from the tools and the material resources. When the doors are closed, Figure 4, the tools can still be seen visibly.
As the phrase: out of sight, out of mind, I hope that by sharing this design, we can make the tools and resources for tinkering visible in our home and light up the child’s interest in exploring STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) topics in his or her daily life.
Notes:
- The wire nets and accessories (e.g. hooks and metal baskets) were purchased from the DAISO shop.
- The companies (e.g. IKEA and DAISO) mentioned in the making of this design concept are provided as suggestions to build the tinkering garage and do not imply an endorsement of the products. All the items are paid by the author.
The Tinkering Studio Singapore 