Trying out ideas, Kinetic sculptures

We now needed to plan how each idea would actually work.

We liked the drawing da Vinci had done of the River Arno, east of Florence. Leonardo came up with a plan to divert the Arno away from the besieged Pisa, so cutting off its supplies from the sea. Leonardo also drew maps of the river to show the water flow. We started by thinking about diverting water, unfortunately original ideas of having water in the museum weren't going to work  so we came up with the idea of making a marble run which visitors could build them selves with a ping pong ball taking on the role of the water flow.

Of course that meant we needed to try the idea for ourselves!

We decided that we would use pipes as the marble run pieces and attach them with magnets to a metal board rather than giving visitors lots of scrap materials to cut up. We wanted people to be able to build their own structures by moving and rearranging the pipe work.

 Next up we also wanted visitors to feel like they were having the chance to invent and problem solve. We liked the idea of cogs which we had seen in one of the drawings and wanted to create a cog board that visitors could create. However we felt that the cogs needed to power or do something rather than just turn, the question was what...

We thought about it releasing sweets or badges or switching on a light and then we came up with the idea of a light going on in Leonardo's brain. We had an image of a portrait of Leonardo which was featured in the exhibition catalogue and wondered if we could place the cogs in his brain, which, when they turned could switch on a light or light bulb above his head.

We decided to mock up the idea to see how it looked, cue a collaborative Leonardo drawing in masking tape ...

Resident IT expert Callum came up with a plan of how it would work complete with strange sounding things such as a gyroscope, an ardunio board and slipring ( which apparently stops wires tangling as they are turned!)