Introducing ‘The Shed’: tinkering with tinkering

Today – Monday 12 September 2016 – marks the first day for open for Questacon’s newest space: The Shed.

The Shed is an innovative and creative place within Questacon dedicated to interdisciplinary experimentation with ideas, tools, science, technologies, and art. It will include hands-on exhibits, artworks from artists and makers, and a tinkering studio where visitors can design and make.

Visitors are encouraged to tinker in The Shed: get hands-on, imagine, create, collaborate, iterate, innovate, revel in success, and learn from failure. It's about playful engineering and iterative design.

This idea of tinkering has been fundamental to The Shed, even before The Shed existed.

The renovations started roughly two months ago. However, the development of the space has been underway for more than a year.

If you've visited Questacon this year, you may have experienced our temporary tinkering space. With cardboard furniture (and a lot of masking tape), we turned the corner of an empty room into an area to test our tinkering activities. Some of these activities were fantastic successes, others were not. And we used the information to help define what we wanted for the design of The Shed.

We were literally tinkering with tinkering.

And now that The Shed is ready, the tinkering is only beginning. Watch this space to see what's happening in The Shed, get a sneak peek at some works-in-progress, and even the occasional glimpse behind the scenes.