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A home for 'groovy ideas' Mail Tribune photos / Jim Craven Above: Dick Alexander of Sorensen Design balances wheel bearing rings on a Gyro Spinner - an exhibit for the new Science Center of Southern Oregon. The rings spin on a rotating platform, which causes a balance of centrifugal and gyroscopic forces. Even before it opens, Ashland's science center gets help from state officials and local inventors By JOHN DARLING I n addition to its dozens of exhibits built by local volunteers, the Science Center of Southern Oregon in Ashland might have exhibits and programs from the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. An OMSI team, including its chief financial officer and a board member, visited SCSO earlier this year, studied the museum site and conferred about sharing in OMSI exhibits and outreach activities, said SCSO executive director Sharon Javna. Officials of the two museums ruled out any merging of staff or financial resources, but OMSI has been helping SCSO with "practical, useful advice" about how to create and operate a large museum, said John Javna, SCSO director of exhibits. "They were very excited about our vision," he said. "But we have to show more of what we're going to be before we create anything concrete with them." Meanwhile, area artisans are building dozens of fascinating and zany exhibits as SCSO moves toward a hoped for opening this fall, using just under half of it's 26,000 square feet and, at the start, a Saturdays-only schedule. Taking shape in the factories of Sorensen Design International in Ashland is a wind tunnel, in which young scientists will be able to launch and fly a radio-controlled airplane. "I couldn't pass it up," said volunteer Mike Sorensen, manufacturer of motion control equipment for major Hollywood films of the last decade. "My two daughters (ages 3 and 5) will find great amusement in these scientific games and they would be very disappointed if daddy didn't build something for the kid's museum. "Every time (the museum officials) get a groovy idea for a project, we'll probably go for it." Sorensen, who has won an Oscar for his robotic dollies (using computer-guided equipment to repeat exactly the same shots), is creating several other interactive museum projects, including a gyroscopic device kids can stand on to demonstrate the physics of centrifugal force. If you enjoyed those little Spirograph toys, you'll get to play with a life-size version - a big swinging platform set in motion, with a pen inking out fantastical geometric patterns. It's being assembled by Jim Hand, an Ashland carpenter, based on a similar device in the San Francisco Exporatorium. As with all projects in the SCSO it draws heavily from donations and volunteer help. Carpet Network of Medford donated the carpeting for the platform and Hand is donating his work. "We had 60 people show up for our call for volunteer help in February," said John Javna. "We base all our exhibits on volunteer help. We just got a parabolic dish for a whisper dish (hearing voices of people far across a room) donated by a Talent couple which would have cost us $3,500 from a museum supplier." (They need one more.) "The volunteers got on board when they saw this was not a tourist attraction, but an educational facility," Javna said. The museum hopes to open with 30-50 exhibits on a cash output of $30,000 to $50,000, largely from donations. It operates in the former Pacific Northwest Museum of Natural History, now owned and leased to SCSO by the Kirlin Foundation of Kirkland, Washington. John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.