nbdadmin, Author at Paul Orselli

Water Exhibit

Acton Discovery Museum - Water Exhibit

Adults and children alike pour, whirl, float, and get hands wet as they control, move, divert, and explore the properties of water. There’s nothing like the immersive, sensory experience of water to excite and engage!

Vortex Movie

Young scientists touch and experiment these whirling water vortices that are open at the bottom. What happens when you place balls inside?

Morph Movie

A laminar stream that jets up 12″ is the testing ground for visitors to create water bells, discs, and other interesting shapes and patterns.

Splash

Another view into the Water Gallery showing the “Laminar Lifter” and the “Pour & Explore” exhibits.

Paul Morph

Paul Orselli experimenting with the Morphable Stream exhibit.

Long View

A partial view into the Water Gallery.

Sound Exhibit

Acton Discovery Museum - Sound Exhibit

Young scientists and their families can explore and experience the amazing properties of sound by creating, seeing, hearing and feeling waves and physical vibrations!

Sound Gallery – Washer Falls

Visitors create jingling, tinkling sounds when they drop metal washers down a variety of threaded rods. (Photo courtesy Kristin Angel)

Bass

Kids and adults explore sound and vibrations in a real-life way by playing with a full-sized bass.

Math Exhibit

Acton Discovery Museum - Math Exhibit

This gallery of fun, hands-on activities uses real world, visual interpretations of mathematical concepts to show that math is all around us!

Math Dance

Visitors dance along with Mickela Mallozi, the Emmy® Award-winning host of the PBS show Bare Feet, which explores traditional cultures around the world through dance. Children and adults can move to the music along with Mickela to recreate mathematical patterns and shapes through dance in this one-of-a-kind exhibit.

Light Table

Young explorers discover symmetry, angles, and space filling by using colorful Magna-Tile geometric shapes on a glowing light table. These magnetic 2D translucent pieces can create 3D structures that glow.

Geoboards Install

Here’s an installation shot (with the 42 Design/Fab crew) of the Geoboards where museum visitors create triangles, squares, curves, patterns, intricate shapes, and even letters when they stretch colored rubber bands on a giant pegboard that wraps around the wall.

Galton

Visitors can experiment with this clever device to find that a similar “bell curve” distribution is generated every time the balls are released, with the majority of the balls in the center of the curve, tapering off to fewer and fewer at each side.

Light and Color Exhibit

Acton Discovery Museum - Light and Color Exhibit

Scientists of all ages can immerse themselves in this vividly engaging exhibit gallery on the properties of light and color. A series of hands-on exhibits in a specially-designed darkened space use LEDs and new materials to create dramatic, high contrast, and aesthetically beautiful light and color.

Light and Color Gallery

A view into the Light & Color gallery. (Photo courtesy MitchellGreenPhotography.com)

Light Lens

Both children and adults delight in manipulating rays of light with mirrors and lenses to focus, reflect, and mix them to create various effects.

Pendulux

Museum visitors swing a light pendulum suspended over a rotating platter of phosphorescent material to produce a beautiful array of “Spirograph” patterns. Experimenters can change the swing of the pendulum or the speed of the rotating platter and see what happens! (Photo courtesy Kristin Angel)

Da Vinci Workshop

Acton Discovery Museum - Da Vinci Workshop

Visitors to the Da Vinci Workshop gallery use tools, tinker, design, build, and invent like the artist, scientist, engineer, and inventor Leonardo Da Vinci. Using recycled materials, off-the-shelf supplies, and tools and technology ranging from scissors and saws to electronic circuits and conductive thread, young scientists design and build diverse creations inspired by the creative thinking and engineering of Da Vinci.

Ornithopter Install

Here’s a view of the crew from DCM Fabrication installing the Ornithopter component.

Ornithopter Crank

Children and adults turn the crank to activate the gears that flap the wings of a model flying machine, inspired by the giant Ornithopter that da Vinci designed to test human-powered flight.

Air Flow

Young scientists can experiment with aerodynamic principles and engineering concepts at the vertical airstream. Visitors use a variety of materials to design and test prototypes that fly and hover. (Photo courtesy MitchellGreenPhotography.com)

Leo

A life size image of Leonardo himself (created by artist Kim Wagner based on da Vinci’s self portrait) welcomes everyone to the Workshop!

Interior Tables

Inspired by da Vinci, visitors use their imaginations and engineering skills to invent new creations and art using recycled materials.

Gear Wall

Young engineers set things into motion with this magnetic wall. Families can create a gear train and watch special gears turn and spin in different directions.

Just One Thing about Exhibits!

Paul Orselli Talks Museum Exhibit FAQs TOO!

Glass Factory Mountain

National Bottle Museum

POW! collaborated with DCM Fabrication and Kim Wagner Nolan to create a dynamic new exhibition for the National Bottle Museum. The “Glass Factory Mountain” exhibition shares stories about the people, processes, and products of the historic Glassworks supplying bottles to ship the famous Saratoga Springs waters.

Title & Credit Panel

Layered acrylic panels provide a striking introduction to the “Glass Factory Mountain” exhibition

Glassworks Maps

Modern and historic maps help visitors understand how the locations of the Glassworks depended on access to the vast quantities of wood – to fire furnaces and sand – to make glass.

Exhibition Video

Glass Factory Mountain Exhibition Video.

People Section Panels

Utilizing 19th-century photographs of glassblowers, Kim Wagner Nolan created large format graphics to punctuate the compelling stories found inside the National Bottle Museum.

Oscar Granger

Oscar Granger, one of the key figures of the Glassworks era, is represented by a life-sized graphic based on a historical painting of Granger.

Bottles Display Case

Drawing upon the Museum’s extensive collections, DCM Fabrication built this custom display case with backlighting for each bottle.

Congressville Section Panel

This display panel picks up architectural details shown in the photographs of the pavilion at Congress Spring, where the public would come to sample the waters.

Glass Furnace Model Front

The front of this “Glass Furnace” display features samples of the components needed to make glass and a touchable piece of glass from one of the 19th-century Glassworks.

Glass Furnace Model Back

The back of the “Glass Furnace” display is a scale model of the type of large furnaces that were used to contain the molten glass that glassblowers formed into bottles.

D&H Canal Museum

The D&H Canal Museum

The D&H Canal Museum is located in High Falls, NY, inside a beautiful historic building originally constructed in 1797 and later used in the 1800s for Canal Company offices.

POW! was proud to partner with Ferwerda Creative Services to develop compelling, immersive environments and thoughtful interactive experiences that illuminate the stories associated with this vital part of American history. In the first months after opening the new facility, the number of visitors exceeded the annual attendance figures in the museum’s previous location!

Important creative partners joining us in this project included 42 Design|Fab Studio, Trivium Interactive, Avery Zucker, and Teddy Vuong. Please credit all photos in this section to Teddy Vuong.

Museum Entrance

D&H Canal Museum Entrance.

D&H Canal Timeline

The introductory section of the D&H Canal Museum puts a twist on the traditional history museum timeline by punctuating the chronology with interactive elements and historical objects and documents.

Economics Area Overview

Inviting graphics and authentic objects, such as a stock certificate and a $3 banknote, displayed inside a period-appropriate desk, help visitors understand the economic importance of the D&H Canal.

Windows to the Past

Large, colorful video displays show the changes that the Canal brought to the region surrounding High Falls over time. POW! and Ferwerda Creative Services worked with Teddy Vuong and museum staff to develop the content and scripting for these units.

New York Cityscape

42 Design|Fab created a stylized, dimensional New York City streetscape from the 1800s using touchable objects to help a broad range of visitors learn about the importance of the materials the D&H Canal transported.

Technology Area Overview

In the Technology Area of the Museum, people can operate an interactive lock model, examine canal boat artifacts, set off a simulated explosion, and operate a scale model of a “coal roller coaster” (also known as the Gravity Railroad).

Roebling Detail

An entire section of the Technology area sits near the watchful eyes of a life-sized cutout of German immigrant engineer John Augustus Roebling. In addition to significant work involving wire rope and the creation of suspension aqueducts that Roebling completed for the D&H Canal, he later went on to design the Brooklyn Bridge.

Blaster Interactive

Museum visitors can take on the role of “blasters,” the men responsible for the dangerous job of blasting large rocks out of the way during the construction of the Canal. Lighting a simulated fuse triggers a video sequence that usually (but not always!) results in a booming explosion.

TAVERN Overview

Since part of the museum building’s original use was as a tavern, we created an immersive environment reflecting a 19th century gathering place to tell social history stories of the women, people of color, immigrants, and even children who all helped to build and operate the D&H Canal.

TAVERN Table Detail

Detail of one of the Tavern tables showing inset document replicas, graphics, and period-appropriate objects that museum visitors can sit down and engage with.

Genius & Generosity

Genius & Generosity - The Elliott Story

The introductory gallery at the Elliott Museum in Stuart Florida gives a glimpse into the life of Sterling Elliott, who the museum is named after.

Through the exhibition visitors discover Sterling’s early life as an inventor, his combined interests in bicycles and social justice, and the business machine empire that he built with his son Harmon.

Entry

Shown here is one of Sterling’s early inventions, the knot-tying machine, which was so impressive that Thomas Edison publicly called Sterling a genius! Also shown here is Sterling’s Quadricycle, whose steering mechanism influences automobile engineering and design to this very day.

Entry Long View

A view into the “Genius & Generosity” exhibition.

Harness Racing Sulky

Sterling Elliott was good friends with his neighbors, the Stanley Brothers. Their shared interests and conversations inspired some of Sterling’s inventions, such as the harness racing sulky located in this part of the exhibit. Elliott’s sulky designs changed harness racing completely, and modern harness racing sulkies still reflect the improvements Sterling Elliott developed over a hundred years ago.

Antique Bicycles

Sterling Elliott not only built bicycles, but he also called for social reforms that would secure more rights for women and African-Americans. The Sterling Bicycle Company manufactured bicycles specifically designed for women when other bicycle companies refused to do so. The top two bicycles featured here show design elements built into Elliott bicycles marketed toward women.

Business Machines Empire

The start of the Elliott Addressing Machine Company came about because of Sterling Elliott’s involvement with bicycles. To mail tens of thousands of subscriptions for “The Bicycling World” magazine more efficiently and quickly than writing out every address by hand, Sterling invented one of his first devices for labeling mail that used address stencils that customers could create themselves. During much of the 20th century, the Elliott Addressing Machine Company was one of the most successful businesses of its kind in the entire world

Looking Back View

Looking back toward the entrance of the “Genius & Generosity” exhibition.