Recently, a friend posted an '80s educational safety video on Facebook, which gruesomely portrayed every which way you could maim and kill yourself in an industrial workplace. Fingers were crushed and chopped off in machinery, bodies were sandwiched under forklifts, and eyeballs were pierced by flying nails. The camp and gore made it more ridiculous than educational, but I can't help but think about this video as I stand next to Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough in the Exploratorium workshop wearing safety goggles and headphones.
I am suddenly aware that we are surrounded by heavy machinery that could easily cut off all my limbs. It also strikes me at this moment that the Exploratorium, San Francisco's interactive science museum that was founded 40 years ago by Frank Oppenheimer, is one of the coolest places I could imagine working in.
I'm jealous of kids who grew up in San Francisco and got to experience the Exploratorium with young eyes, but maybe what's great about the museum is that it can take grown-ups back to those wonder years. At the Exploratorium you experience the exhibits through interaction and play, whether it be learning about your sense of touch by slithering and groping your way around the pitch black Tactile Dome or learning about vision by cutting into a cow's eyeball.
For full disclosure, I've known Mary Elizabeth for several years. Back in the day, I wrote about her in the Bay Guardian, focusing on her work as a visual artist and musician (You may recognize her as a member of San Francisco experimental metal band T.I.T.S. or maybe you've seen her artwork at the Luggage Store, Adobe Books, or Silverman Gallery). A few years ago, she designed the cover of my band's 7-inch record. When I ask the museum to hook me up with an exhibit designer to shadow, it was a pleasant surprise when it turned out to be Mary Elizabeth.
I meet up with Mary Elizabeth in the Exploratorium workshop, the heart and soul of the museum. It is here that the exhibits are created, from their inception as mere ideas to the final working, interactive structures. The shop is exactly how you'd imagine it - a large industrial space filled with a bazillion different things - from sawhorses, ladders and cabinets to tools, machines and computers. This place is Bill Nye's wet dream. And if you don't believe me, you can actually see for yourself - visitors can look down into the workshop from the main staircase going up to the second floor.
After giving me a hello hug, Mary Elizabeth picks up a paint roller and starts attacking two large sheets of soundproof fiber wallboard with black paint. Rather than wear a smock, she delicately holds her gray cardigan closed over her blue and red striped shirt while she nimbly coats each board with a layer of paint. These are going to be replacement walls for an exhibit she had developed that was currently on display called 'Out Quiet Yourself.'
In between strokes, she lays down the roller and suddenly is doing something else: Checking another project, showing me machinery in the woodshop, tinkering with a heap of materials for another exhibit-to-be, talking with a co-worker, and reminding herself to put up a 'Wet Paint' sign for the boards. It becomes ridiculously obvious that this is the sort of workplace where multitasking isn't just an attribute, but a necessary skill - Mary Elizabeth admits, 'This place fosters ADD.'
Mary Elizabeth started working at the museum as an intern in the workshop in 2001 while she was a grad student at the California College of the Arts. Although she didn't have a science background, her welding knowledge landed her the internship. She eventually became a museum tech helping to build the exhibits, and finally became an exhibit developer, or person who creates and shepherds an exhibit from beginning to end.
While the boards are drying, Mary Elizabeth takes me upstairs to see some of the exhibits that she created, including the aforementioned 'Out Quiet Yourself,' an exhibit in which visitors try to walk across a path of gravel as quietly as they can. A computer records and displays how much noise participants make while walking upon the gravel, and even tells them to start over, if they make too much noise. We watch as spry rugrats alternate between tiptoeing and running across the gravel.
Mary Elizabeth points out the worn out paint on the walls near the edges of the gravel path. I ask, 'Why are the walls worn?' Before she can answer, I see it in action. A kid shimmies along the edge of the walls, not even touching the path below so as not to disturb the gravel below. Cheater! Part of Mary Elizabeth's job is learning from watching people interact with her inventions, and watching people destroy it. 'You need to break it in 50 million ways so it's as bulletproof as possible,' she says.
We visit another one of her creations, the 'Sonic Storytelling' booth, a soundproof room where visitors recreate and record radio dramas using props like a miniature door you can slam, two boards you slap together to mimic a gunshot, and so on. Mary Elizabeth had to figure out ways to safely secure the props so they could be easily accessible, and so they wouldn't get broken or stolen. She took note of the small things that you and I might not think about - like making sure the height of the tabletop is wheelchair accessible and hiding unsightly cords, bolts, and expensive microphones.
When it comes to museum exhibits, she says, 'the less ingredients, the better' so that people will keep their attention on the point of the display instead of finding ways to break or dismantle it. She is mostly successful, but we laugh at how thrashed the prop door is - its doorknob is mangled and banged-up, and the blue paint is seriously scratched-up as if a mini Jack Torrance had been trying to axe his way through. She admits that it can be difficult to watch kids recklessly break the things she so carefully and lovingly builds, but really, it's just part of the job.
Mary Elizabeth's work-in-progress is a huge project for a new exhibition called 'Geometry Playground.' One of the many components in it will be Space Cubes, gigantic structures that visitors can walk through to tactically experience geometry. Mary Elizabeth is currently working with small-scale prototypes, but she's already thinking about the life-size version and how she'll create it without any possibility that a person can injure himself or die while climbing on or in it. It's all fun and games until someone's head gets stuck in a geometric structure.
The longer I spend with Mary Elizabeth, the more I realize that Spider-man is right - with great power comes great responsibility. Sure they have cool jobs, but exhibits developers actually have to consider the possibility that people can get hurt, and even die, on their inventions, not to mention get hurt themselves. As we walk around the woodshop, I notice several precautionary notices, from a jokey staff-made Rodney Dangerfield sign, to a no-beating-around-the-bush skull and crossbones caveat.
When I ask if she's ever been seriously hurt she knocks on wood and shows me the belt sander that once almost shredded her thumb. I realize that Mary Elizabeth can't be inattentive or sloppy, even for a second. It seems ironic, but also makes sense, that a job creating fun exhibits for children can be so dangerous. Thankfully, by the time I part ways with Mary Elizabeth, all our fingers and toes are still intact.
photos courtesy of Amy Snyder/Exploratorium
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