 Good afternoon. My name is Nicole Quadra. I'm programming an outreach manager for San Mateo County Libraries where our tagline is open for exploration. Today, I'm here to talk about the Lookmobile. The Lookmobile has been called a mobile observatory, a learning lab, a museum on wheels. Unlike a bookmobile, the Lookmobile doesn't contain books. Created in collaboration with San Francisco's Exploratorium, the Lookmobile was designed to bring hands on inquiry-based learning outdoors, to create an inviting, highly visible, and welcoming public space, attracting new library users, non-users, or elapsed users who might not realize how awesome libraries are. This is a view of the Lookmobile on opening day, December 2016, at the East Palo Alto Library. One of our library's strategic goals is to cultivate an active presence in our communities and create spaces that support discovery in enriched lives and uplift the community. The Lookmobile offers tools and activities for seeing the world from different points of view. It was designed to encourage people to linger, to take a closer look, to experiment, to create, and reflect upon the world around them. This is a view of the interior of the Lookmobile, and it really is quite pretty. The Lookmobile consists of six core interactive experiences, all designed to encourage open-ended discovery, includes tools and activities for seeing the world from different points of view. The visitor moves from light to the dark, visitors are invited to draw their friends and surroundings using the perspective window, lenses flip the view upside down, evocative maps reveal surprising ideas about places you thought you knew, visitors are invited to pin their own creations on the walls around them. The Lookmobile is an evolving work in progress, adding new elements and linking communities as it travels throughout the county. Starting on the outside, visitors are greeted with the map wall. Maps were chosen for their quirky character or particular way of communicating information, and because they show more than geography or political boundaries, we want to show that maps also represent values, different points of view, different perspectives. I just want to point out, I don't know if there are any fans in the room, but I believe that is the settlers of Catan Game Board. Missing a map of Westeros though. These maps can be swapped out and changed, so I think that will be one of the next installations. Visitors are then invited to make their own maps, drawing what is familiar and has personal significance for them. Visitors are encouraged to express their unique perspective on the environment and their place in it. Selena has drawn, well we have a lot of maps from her, and they're all equally colorful and amazing, and here I think she has drawn the road from her house to her family car. This one shows North and South America with Venezuela, lovingly highlighted. This one is just showing a lot of California love, I think. And this next one is my absolute favorite, it's really faint, I'm sorry, I thought I might trace over it, but you can see that Emma has drawn a dog, or she has mapped a dog, which I think is awesome, love it. Moving inside the Lookmobile there are more maps and a perspective drawing window. Visitors can trace their friends and surroundings. From inside, looking out. The window helps you draw with accurate perspective, capturing scenes as they appear to your eyes. It's often quite surprising to people how perspective makes very large things quite small in a drawing. This man is drawing that large truck parked outside. Built into the trailer's front section a wall of pinhole cameras projects images from the local landscape into the trailer. Each lens has a different focal length which results in slightly different images and different depths of field. This is a closer look at the dream-like light of the pinhole camera wall. And this is a view of the pinhole camera wall from the outside. Again it is quite pretty. Friends like to look at each other through the pinhole camera wall. The camera obscura is located in a periscope poking through the top of the Lookmobile. Light is bounced from a mirror, through a lens then focuses on a white table top. Visitors can turn the top mounted camera, turn it around like a periscope to look at their surrounding environment. And then last is the fog tricycle. It's an open-ended exhibit designed to get people to experiment and play with fog. The fog trike reproduces our region's distinctive fog belt. On a portable scale visitors blow, push and swirl thick clouds of water vapor replicating the fog formations that cling to the San Mateo County coastline. So I'm going to wrap up with a few slides that show how we have used the Lookmobile to cultivate an active presence in our communities in our outreach. Here a hiker explores the Lookmobile while stopped at a trailhead in San Pedro Valley Park. This is one of my favorite stops ever. It was a beautiful day. You kind of can't tell maybe the sun went behind a cloud for this picture. But there are about five trailheads that lead from that particular spot. And it just had a really nice synergy with its environment there. Here a community member explores the map wall at East Palo Alto Library. At Sunridge Elementary School a teacher brings her very well-behaved class to visit the Lookmobile. A class of middle schoolers visits the Lookmobile at Valomar School in Pacifica. And here those Valomar students work on their maps. So these young people are at the San Mateo County Fair and it looks like they're collaborating on a map. And this is another group at the County Fair last summer. This is the Fog Tric at the County Fair. And I really like this picture. These are young scholars from our big lift inspiring summers summer camp. Checking out how fog is made with the fog tricycle. The Lookmobile visited all of our camp locations this summer. And then here I'm going to attempt to play just a young child playing in fog. All right. So thank you. I'm going to leave you with this quote from a Lookmobile lover. And then introduced to my colleague Sean Lanny with the Exploratorium Studio for Public Spaces. Thank you. Hello that video. Hello that video. That level of engagement. I mean we use a lot of words for learning play is an excellent indicator of engagement of investigation of investment. And it's one of the hallmarks I think for the kind of what we mean by informal inquiry. It looks just like that sounds a lot fancier. It's better for getting the grants. But when we say informal inquiry that's what we're looking for is that sort of behavior. Let me see if I can get this right. So we we started looking outdoors eight years ago at the Exploratorium as a potential of of expanding our impact as an institution. So if you think about outdoors spaces we generally think just outside the doors of our institutions because that's probably the easiest place to put stuff outdoors and take care of it. But as we started to investigate the potential we started thinking well why just outside the doors of the institution. Why not say somewhere like on Market Street in San Francisco. So three years ago we got invited to do what they call the living innovation zone. And after bobbing about for a while we thought well let's try something that we know works well. They're listening vessels. They're eight feet in diameter and if you there's two of them out there and if you sit in one you can whisper to somebody 50 feet away on Market Street. So you can talk to a total stranger anybody. And if things go south you have a 50 foot head start. Head down market because what you're doing here is you're breaking all the rules on how to survive in San Francisco on Market Street. You don't look people in the eye. You don't talk to random strangers. You don't put your bag down for any given reason. And you don't turn your back to to long alleyways like this. And it turns out that this installation was like a wrecking ball for those social norms that human freeway out there where people were passing by each other. And became a really important gathering spot and actually led to some really interesting discourse between people that otherwise might not have spoken with each other. So this bench was also located in that it's a singing bench. So if one person has a hand on the metal on the left and the other has the hand on the metal on the right and they hold hands music starts to be generated. And if you touch fingertips or kiss the sound tones change because the amount of conductivity shifts. And so we were really focusing on getting people to move beyond the way that they saw not only things like sound and how sound moves which is all very technical. But think about how they themselves are generators of place and they themselves are generators of culture. They make a place by the way that they behave. And by giving him that sense of agency you can call it civic agency. And actually it fundamentally shifted people's perceptions of Market Street and their role in the daily lives of how they move through the city. Their roles as active players. And we were also able to engage with what we call the indigenous phenomenon of a place. So before we might have made an exhibit about sand and water and it's all very beautiful. When we got to the location we actually dredged the bottom of the bay and we brought these dredges up and put those in these thin shells of water. And when you spun it around you saw basically what made up the bottom of the bay. And then you got to look at like why is the sand there and why is it so silty there. So it's really kind of a blueprint for how the bay works. And so this intrigues us. And then when we talked about the locomobile we said well if we're going to roll into town you can't just roll into town in a grey box right. So we were looking like well we really want to we want this thing to be engaging. We want the locomobile to be something that it's like the circus comes to town right. You throw a little glitter in the air and have a bullhorn. So looking at San Mateo the county was really intriguing to us because it was huge. That is a huge county and extremely diverse. So not only with the economics but the socioeconomics and the settings and the variety of ways of living. They're all kind of in high relief. I mean if you travel enough now in the world you understand just how much impact this region has on so many people's lives. Worldwide. And so looking at this as an opportunity we were also trying to serve as individual libraries. So what are the needs of the libraries and what will we do has to work in all these different settings right. So we got really enamored with this idea of map making. Map making is you saw those drawings right. You can actually give a little bit of yourself when you make a map and you don't have to make a map. And we wanted to make sure that the maps weren't seen as purely geological or geographical. And maps were about power to whoever draws the map or setting lines and setting rules. And so in some ways by drawing map or making a map you're saying this is my family. This is what my daily commute looks like. This is how I see my home and my place. And this is who I am. That's what that map making exercise is about. So again we get back to that sense of agency that sense of making is important. And we were inspired by a lot of weird things looking through for ideas. If you're going to look at the landscape changing your view or perspective or framing is often an excellent way to reconsider what you think you already know about where you are and who you are and how you fit in. And so we went through a number of different ideas and permutations. Things might unfold. Things might zigzag or accordion. One of the big problems we had or the challenges we had was ADA accessibility. So trailers are fantastic if you can get up into the trailer. So we found a trailer that actually squats down to the ground. And they make these for really expensive car toys that go up to Sonoma and race around in tracks and can't lift more than a couple inches off the ground. But the nice thing about these is it allowed us to have full access without having to do something like this which is a ramp. So this is an early sketch. As the idea evolved this whole idea of something that was accessible that had different compartments associated with it. So the dark end with a camera obscura and the pinhole camera back to the more active map making to the perspective window which got you kind of out of the cerebral into the actual observing matured into an increasingly dynamic design. And then funny I was telling her before this didn't start like we didn't go to San Mateo kind of library say hey we really want to build a trailer. They actually approached us looking at outdoor public spaces as additions to libraries. And that is the focus of the studio for public spaces is enlivening these public spaces because they're hugely accessible. Only 11% of people go to museums. And I think if you're arguing that you have social or cultural impact it's difficult to make that argument with such a rarefied audience. And so working in public spaces and taking full advantage of those learning environments is something we're very much interested in. So the lookmobile itself is very much considered a prototype by us to get to know how libraries work. What can they offer programmatically? What do they need? What do their audiences respond to? And by having a platform to drag around we actually had a rolling archive. So when people made maps those maps get stored or they get displayed and you get a little bit of where that trailer's been left behind as evidence of what really makes up these counties. And so with that in mind the way we got to the final installation was through prototyping. This is Becca who's an architect and this is Hiba. Hiba was visiting from Palestine. They're starting a museum from scratch in Palestine. If that sounds easy it's not. They have challenges that are difficult for us to understand I think. But amazing spirits and there are 12 of them out here for three months. And she helped prototype the pinhole camera wall. Here's our chief engineer. We're sitting in a big cardboard box that we built with lenses and it is as fun as it sounds. And that's our studio back there. And likewise we did this with a map. So if you want to have an exhibition that invites people to make maps and gets over the phobia of drawing. Like if you ask me to draw a house they get a little nervous or draw a cat. But what we did it was the trick we put us some really crappy drawings. Like really bad drawings. And we made sure that like oh I could do better than that. And that got them over that hump you know. And it also I think it got people thinking differently about what it was that they were mapping. Not only like how do I get to school or what is my best friend live. But this is a map of my heart it says. So it's my grandma my grandpa my wife music involved mom and the brothers. This is a map of how they live and where they live. Not that that was really sweet and telling that people were willing to kind of share. When you asked them in the right way and you gave them a tool to express themselves. Who they were and how they thought that they fit in the world. So the look mobile. Not complete. I don't consider it complete. It's only been out there for a year. We're learning a lot about the functionality of it and what kind of care it takes. I think the potential of combining moves like this with outdoor public spaces and libraries that are taking advantage of their immediate parks. Many you know libraries have an incredible set of assets. And if their locations are amendable to having those outdoor spaces be part of their ongoing programming. I think that would be a bold move because it takes commitment. But from what we've seen and experience over the last four years at the Exploratorium. We know that the learning outcomes and potentials are far broader when you're in context of people's what they consider. They're kind of normal day to day lives. And so even though it's outside the library it's still outdoors and in public space. And I think when you change the context in that way you are opening up possibilities that simply don't exist inside institutions that are traditionally educational institutions. But probably programmatically set or habituated to offering a certain kind of program. This is an example of an extreme I consider to extreme risk. We put in and these are still just outside if you swing to the West in UN Plaza you'll see a set of five outdoor installations. This is an echo tube pointed right at City Hall. There was a little label there it says it said it was a little teeny label and said it takes about it takes two seconds for sound to reach City Hall in about a week for them to get back to you. Maybe maybe it was a month I forget. And then yeah so we had a sense of humor about it but this exhibition and Ray up in that corner there really taught us that people are absolutely critical to making these things work. If people aren't there mediating it and helping people through it not caretaking like you know get off that bench and don't crawl on that. But really engaging people in a way that all these people are local from hundreds of you family. So they're they're from the area. A lot of them have training and dealing with people that are often considered problems for San Francisco and they have a way of. Well when we designed this initially we were thinking less about sound and more about kind of social bomb. Like how do you make this more human. How do you how do you humanize a space that seems so desperate sometimes and so empty and desolate. But it doesn't matter where you're from or where you are in life when you're doing inquiry and playing and learning. It kind of humanizes you and it equalizes you in a way that's really unique. And I think that was one of the big surprises of working in you and Plaza. And also the idea of building right on the last slide for open-endedness is really important. So she came along with her violin and started playing and I thought that was wonderful because we didn't build it for violin players. But we didn't build it for not violin players. So I think keeping that the opportunity and just the pure potential open to your users to decide how they want to use and what they want to do. What they want to how they want to use the work is really an important part of making these places work. Okay. I have a thank you at the end.