Dear Friends and Supporters of the Lemelson Center,
A second pandemic year created a challenging working environment for the Lemelson Center team in 2021, but also stimulated new projects and motivated us to expand and deepen our online invention education work. The Lemelson Center team continued to carry out and support research into the diversity of invention and inventors, past and present; advanced exhibition design and content for Game Changers; created new virtual invention activities for young people and those young at heart; and organized a wide variety of Zoom webinars. Among our highlights, I would point to the publication of Eric Hintz’s book, American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D (MIT Press), an exciting season of Innovative Lives programs, some amazing and fun new online invention challenges and activities, reaching the 65% design stage for Game Changers, remarkable uptake of the Picturing Women Inventors poster series created in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service; and an amazing opportunity to run a pop-up Spark!Lab in Doha, Qatar, thanks to a collaboration with the Qatar Foundation and ConocoPhillips. Read more about these projects and other exciting work of the team in this report.
The combination of an ongoing pandemic, new and renewed attention to the failure to include and resource women and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) inventors and innovators in the US innovation system, and tradeoffs in privacy, access, and equity associated with changes in technology remain top of mind for many organizations. Inventing for the future isn’t only about envisioning and trying to build hovering skateboards, driverless cars, or currency-less purchasing; it also needs to consider how new technology impacts the dynamics of power between different groups and geographies in the US and internationally, and how to move away from single-use products and greenhouse gas emissions that threaten all of us.
In the coming year, we’re more eager than ever to reopen Draper Spark!Lab to youth visitors even as our invention education team continues to design digital activities and challenges. And excitement is building for the Game Changers exhibition, where we will explore inventive identity through the lens of sporting inventions, and ask every visitor to identify challenges in their own lives and invent solutions!
Arthur Daemmrich, Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director