Posts Tagged the henry ford magazine
Designed decades ago, the Aeron Chair remains a wonder of ergonomics.
Even while seated, people tend to crave motion. Chairs that move — by rocking, reclining, rolling, revolving or otherwise — are often the most comfortable chairs because they respond to the body. This principle was one of many incorporated into the study of ergonomics, or the science of designing products and environments for compatibility with the human body.
In the 1960s, ergonomics began to gain traction with industrial designers. Bill Stumpf came of age as a designer during this period and became interested in ergonomics in the late 1960s while a postgraduate at the University of Wisconsin. He studied existing ergonomics research by designers as well as the work of scientists, doctors and medical researchers. Stumpf applied these scientific principles in the design of his first office chair for the Herman Miller furniture company. Called the Ergon Chair (short for ergonomic), it debuted in 1976 as the first truly ergonomic office chair.
Perhaps the best-known ergonomic office chair, the Aeron Chair, was also designed by Stumpf in partnership with Don Chadwick. Office workers spend hours seated at a desk, mainly since the rise of personal computers, and office chairs before the 1970s often did more harm than good to their inhabitants. Stumpf and Chadwick endeavored to design an ergonomic office chair that built on the lessons they learned in developing their previous chairs, especially their Sarah Chair, which was designed for the elderly to mitigate the bodily impact of sitting for long periods.
Photo by EE Berger
The Aeron Chair was released in 1994 to immediate acclaim. The seat of the chair uses an elastic plastic mesh, called pellicle, to replace the foam cushions of a traditional office chair. A tilt mechanism, with adjustable components, provides opportunities for movement, even at rest.
Although the Aeron Chair turned 30 years old this year, it is still regarded as the gold standard in office chairs — its ergonomic design continuing to serve the needs of office workers around the world.
This post was written by Katherine White, curator of design at The Henry Ford, and adapted from an article in the Winter/Spring 2024 issue of The Henry Ford Magazine.
Skateboarding can change how we see and interact with the world
By Roy Christopher
I don’t know any casual skateboarders. Everyone I know who’s ever done it has either an era of their lives or their entire essence defined by it — the rebellion, the aggression, the expression.
Inextricably bound up with your being, it’s the way you wear your hair and the way you wear your hat. It’s the kind of shoes you wear and which foot you put forward. It’s the crew you run with and the direction you go. There is something about rolling through the world on a skateboard that changes people forever.
Ever since I first saw Wes Humpston’s Dogtown cross on the bottom of a friend’s skateboard in the sixth grade, I knew it was going to be a part of my world. I first stepped on a skateboard at the age of 11. There are scant few physical acts or objects that have had a larger impact on who I am and how I am. Through the wood, the wheels and the graphics, skateboarding culture introduced me to music, art and attitude. Like Dischord Records co-founder Ian MacKaye said to journalist Dan Sinker in 2001, “Skateboarding is not a hobby.” More than 20 years later when I interviewed MacKaye myself, he further elaborated. “It was a discipline. It was the way that we learned how to navigate our surroundings, and the world was transformed by this navigation because we suddenly saw everything a little bit differently than it had originally appeared.”
Photo by Adobe Stock
Riding a skateboard fundamentally changes the way you see the world and yourself in it.
Sport vs. Lifestyle
Skateboarders have always found their own use for everything in the city. First, it was surfing the open waves of sidewalks and streets, as cited in Iain Borden’s Skateboarding, Space and the City. Then the challenges of the steep walls in empty backyard pools beckoned. Eventually, street skating found affordances in everything: ledges, curbs, stairs, handrails — edges and angles of all kinds.
Even with the proliferation of skateparks, pure street skating remains a true measure of skill and vision. As pro skateboarder John Rattray shared in a Nike SB interview, “It’s been game-changing for me to learn how and why the actual movement of skateboarding helps us to neurologically regulate.”
Skateboarding culture highlights the inherent adolescent tension between wanting to be an individual and wanting to belong to a group. It’s a brand of cognitive dissonance emphasized in the still-growing pubescent brain that peaks with the rapid growth and nagging confusion of young adulthood. Miki Vuckovich, a photographer and fixture in the skateboarding industry, once told me, “Skateboarding is a rebellion. It’s a sport, an activity, a lifestyle adopted primarily by adolescents, and as an individualistic activity, it gives participants a sense of independence. It sets them apart from others who don’t skate, and their own particular approach to skateboarding further differentiates them from their skating peers.”
I liken it to the notion that when different innovations and situations exist in your world, your brain changes. New knowledge and new tools physically and chemically alter the makeup of what’s in your head — our brains are different when different inventions come to be. That is, we have different thoughts and dreams after certain ideas and innovations seep into our world. We simply see things through a new lens.
Photo by Adobe Stock
According to Raphaël Zarka’s On a Day with No Waves, riding a skateboard changes how one sees the world generally and the built environment specifically. Where most see streets, sidewalks, curbs, walls and handrails, skateboarders see a veritable playground of ramps and obstacles to be manipulated and overcome in the name of fun. Hills are for speed. Edges are for grinding or sliding. Anything else is for jumping onto or over. Looking through this lens, all one sees are lines to follow and lines to cross. It’s a familiar story to skateboarders, the before and after, because skateboarding redefines everyone who does it as well as the way they see and interact with the world around them.
Minding the Gap
Game designer Brian Schrank defines affordance mining as a way of determining a technology’s “underutilized actionable properties and developing methods of leveraging those properties.” An affordance, according to famed American psychologist James J. Gibson, is simply an object’s capacity for use, the operations or manipulations it will support. Schrank mined affordances most famously from computer keyboards, designing games that challenge the use and user of QWERTY keyboards to find new ways of interacting with the common computer. Schrank’s game Hello Zombie Mouth, for instance, involved mashing the keys on a keyboard to control a mouth as it yawns and stutters trying to say “Hello.” For the game, six regions of the keyboard were mapped, each to a phoneme. A few attempts with such a haptic puzzle quickly demonstrate the untapped potential of such everyday devices for not-so-everyday applications.
One can find the same untapped potential when applying these techniques to ourselves — internally as well as externally — as well as to skateboarding. Explained pro skater Rattray, “Skateboarding requires intense focus, even when we’re doing a trick we’ve done thousands of times, there’s a level of focus — what is the ground like, where are the cracks, how can I adjust my weight, how much speed do I need? And you do this all through the physical sensation. It forces us out of our thoughts and into our body.”
After suffering bouts of depression yet not knowing what he was experiencing, and then losing his sister to suicide, Rattray began the campaign Why So Sad? in 2017 to drive awareness, education and fundraising around mental well-being and suicide prevention in the skate community. He continued:
One of my main points of contention with this subject we call ‘mental health’ is the idea that it is somehow separate from physical health. Like it’s some different weird thing that we can’t understand or even see, so we must be afraid of it. And then the toxic idea that if we are tarred with the mental health brush, then we are done for, damaged goods, and we can’t ever heal. This is physical stuff we’re working with here. It’s neurochemicals, your endocrine system, dopamine, cortisol, adrenaline, and all the rest of it.
Photo by Adobe Stock
The reconciling of physical with mental health is paramount, realizing your own physics as a skateboarder, an athlete, a person. Fellow pro skater Nicole Hause flipped it, sharing thoughts in her Nike SB interview, “The more therapy you do, and the more time you spend with it, the more it compounds; you understand it, and it becomes easier. It’s a skill you learn like skateboarding.”
Learning to work through what Hause calls “stuck points,” like you’re trying to kickflip down some stairs or grind a long ledge, is a personal triumph, appropriating the affordances of your own mind in similar ways to that of skateboarding the streets.
“Skateboarders, particularly adolescents, seek identity,” added photographer Vuckovich. “They want to be a part of a community that reflects what they’re feeling or how they see the world.”
Skateboarding changes the world by changing the mind. Skateboarding works constantly against the limitations of the built environment. Skateboarding is where the predictions of design and the desires of humans diverge. Skateboarding is where the body and the brain move together to overcome obstacles. Repurposing terrain made for other things and remolding the mind in the process, skateboarding is a reinterpretation of the affordances of the world.
This post was adapted from an article in the Summer/Fall 2024 issue of The Henry Ford Magazine.
The simple answer: to tell a meaningful, engaging and informative story. But we could say the same for any exhibit component. Exhibit labels and signs meet those criteria, as do videos, artifacts and our skilled presenters. For an exhibition designer, the question is more complex and depends largely on the situation. Digital media is just one of many experiential techniques to choose from.
Being informative is easy. A white label with black text stating the birth date of a historical figure provides sufficient information. In some cases, it’s exactly what’s needed. A more challenging task is making the informative engaging and therefore meaningful. To do this, we must find the best storytelling device that allows us to connect to universal ideas where all individuals — within our wide spectrum of guests — can find relevance.
Digital experiences excel in areas where there’s a need to convey complex or layered information, attract through novelty and fun, or respond with flexibility and adaptability. Virtual exploration — by simulation or transportation — has the magical ability to whisk our guests beyond the confines of our campus (or bring them to us) and put them into situations they may never find themselves in, such as walking on the wings of an airplane or working on a racing pit crew. The possibilities are nearly endless, and emerging technologies are ever widening the imagination. I’m sure an AI chatbot would have lots to say on the subject.
Despite the many exciting opportunities with digital, it isn’t always the best choice. Hardware and code evolve at a rapid pace, and keeping up can be costly. We also consider how our museum experiences are unique in 2024 when many of us live entrenched in a digital world already. Our ideal exhibition experience is one where guests don’t notice the methods — and the complex questions feel like they have simple answers.
Written by Wing Fong, director of Experience Design, The Henry Ford
This post was adapted from an article in the Winter/Spring 2024 issue of The Henry Ford Magazine.
Dancer Martha Graham was formidable in her work, art and life.
Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1894, Martha Graham first became captivated by dance when, at 17 years old, she saw Ruth St. Denis — known even then as a pioneer for drawing influence from Asian dance forms — perform in Los Angeles. In 1916, Graham joined the Denishawn dance troupe (co-founded by St. Denis and her then-husband and dance partner, Ted Shawn), and began a performance career that would continue until her retirement from the stage at age 74.
In 1926, Graham founded the Martha Graham Dance Company with herself as principal choreographer. Her work would come to define modern dance, with her technique creating the first teachable methodology. Eschewing the delicate, airy aesthetic of traditional ballet, Graham’s choreography was grounded, focusing on the contraction and release of the body, originating in the solar plexus. Sharp, sometimes harsh movements, interrupted by moments of spiraling fluidity, were used to convey an emotional reality in each performance.
Early in 2024, The Henry Ford acquired five color slides documenting the creative collaboration between Graham and designer Isamu Noguchi. Noguchi designed sets for over 20 of the company’s performances (including Graham’s most notable work, Appalachian Spring), his spare but innovative designs pairing perfectly with Graham’s choreographic style. The images capture dancers in action among Noguchi’s set pieces, evoking the energy and reality of the performances in a way that programs or other ephemera would not.
Slide images from performances of (clockwise from bottom) Acrobats of God (1960), Seraphic Dialogue (1955) and Frontier (1935). Photo by EE Berger.
Martha Graham’s importance lies not just in her choreography; the same thread of boldness ran throughout her life. Years after her death in 1991, she is remembered for her forceful personality — she was known for pushing herself and those around her, inspiring in many an intense devotion to her and her teachings — and her unflinching commitment to telling feminist stories through her works, which often included unvarnished depictions of female power and sexuality.
Collecting her work — even in the smallest of images — allows The Henry Ford to explore more of Graham’s dynamic story.
This post was written by Rachel Yerke-Osgood, associate curator, and adapted from an article in the Winter/Spring 2024 issue of The Henry Ford Magazine.
2024 marks two milestone anniversaries for the Ford Rouge Complex
By Paige Gilbert, social media manager, The Henry Ford
One hundred years ago, in 1924, Henry Ford opened the massive Ford Rouge Complex for the public to see and experience the manufacturing process. By 1936, a memorable phase of Rouge tours began. The Ford Rotunda — originally designed for the 1934 World’s Fair — reopened as a visitor center and starting point for tourgoers who boarded glass-roofed buses to see the massive complex. Some of today’s guests still remember walking through the steel operations plant.
Ford Rouge Complex circa 1955 / THF274424
After a 1962 fire destroyed the Rotunda, Ford Motor Company opened a building called the Spirit of Ford directly across from Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and bused tour attendees from there to the Rouge. In the early ’80s, Ford stopped offering factory tours for various reasons.
In the late ’90s, Bill Ford, then chairman of Ford’s board, began to reimagine a Rouge Complex of the future. He brought on architect and designer William McDonough to help make the Rouge more efficient and sustainable. Together, they envisioned a site that could become a model of industrial production and environmental redesign. The complex saw many transformations — including new approaches to stormwater management, landscaping, waste minimalization and lighting, as well as the creation of one of the world’s largest “living roofs.”
With this redevelopment came the opportunity to build a visitor center and reopen the factory to the public. The visitor center project came to life through a collaboration between Ford Motor Company, The Henry Ford and UAW Local 600.
Twenty years ago, on May 3, 2004, the Rouge reopened to the public, this time with tours managed by The Henry Ford. Today, Ford Rouge Factory Tour guests are bused from Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation to be immersed in the past, present and future of American manufacturing as they get an inside look at where the Ford F-150 is assembled.
Since 2004, the Ford Rouge Factory Tour has welcomed more than 2 million guests from all over the world.
This post was adapted from an article in the Winter/Spring 2024 issue of The Henry Ford Magazine.
Our carousel exposed: a simple mechanism with lots of pizzazz
Each week Jacob Hildebrandt, manager, historic operating machinery, climbs atop Greenfield Village's Herschell-Spillman Carousel to properly lubricate its gears and fittings. During the season, the Henry Ford staff also do daily safety inspections of the carousel, listening for squeaks and grinding noises, inspecting for loose boards and bolts, putting pressure on every animal and many other checks. / Photo by EE Berger
In this blog, we examine what's at the heart of the carousel — the inner workings that keep the ride in motion and the staff that maintains its motor, gears and bearings so thousands of visitors can go round and round and up and down each year.
Today, a 10-horsepower electric motor runs the carousel. In 1913 when the ride was built, it was likely run by an early Westinghouse electric motor, said Jacob Hildebrandt, manager, historic operating machinery.
A fairly simple machine, the carousel's motor turns a vertical drive shaft that runs up to the crown of the ride. The rotation of that shaft then rotates a large ring gear at the top that turns the carousel round.
“It's like twirling an umbrella,” said Hildebrandt. “All the power comes from the middle and spreads out.”
The carousel's electric motor is connected to a gearbox with an electric brake and torque converter similar to a vehicle so the motor can run before the carousel begins to spin, avoiding jerky, sudden movements. The brake can bring the ride to a complete stop within two revolutions.
Radiating from the middle are smaller crankshafts with bevel gears, which is what the carousel's moving animals hang from. The rotation of these shafts and gears — and therefore the up-and-down motion of the animals — is powered by the carousel's spin.
Marc Greuther, vice president, historical resources and chief curator, who has intimate knowledge of the underbelly of the carousel, likens the transfer of power from a shaft on a vertical axis to a set of undulating animals on a platform as “a quiet masterpiece of motion."
To keep this masterpiece in motion, Hildebrandt, one other full-time employee and a part-time staffer are on-site daily climbing about the ride lubricating its gears and fittings. “Functionally, the grease we use is one of the most modern things about the carousel today,” he said.
The carousel is equipped with highly durable Babbitt-style bearings, added Hildebrandt, rather than the now more common ball bearings. In the early days, these bearings and the carousel's gears would have been lubricated with a less-viscous oil, which is much messier and ephemeral than the grease now used — which “sticks to everything,” said Hildebrandt.
While some of the carousel's larger gears have worn and been replaced over the years, for the most part its internal hardware remains original. “It's a fairly straightforward mechanism underneath the skin,” said Greuther. “An application of very, very practical machinery that's the result of innovation and applications in industry.”
Jennifer Laforce, managing editor, The Henry Ford Magazine
A rare collection of correspondence reflects the process of relocating the Wright brothers' buildings to Greenfield Village.
By Jennifer LaForce, Managing Editor, The Henry Ford Magazine
Both the Wright brothers’ cycle shop and family home in Greenfield Village are popular spots for the thousands of guests that visit The Henry Ford each year. During spring and summer, it’s not uncommon to see crowds surround the structures as they listen to presenters talk about Wilbur and Orville Wright, their bicycles and aircraft.
Letter from Orville Wright to Fred Black about Acquiring Wright Home for Greenfield Village, November 3, 1936 / THF714291
The Henry Ford recently acquired correspondence that helps bring to light how the buildings came to be in Greenfield Village in the late 1930s. It’s a collection of letters and other materials from former The Henry Ford staffers Fred Black and Fred Smith. Close liaisons to Henry Ford, Black and Smith are considered legendary in The Henry Ford’s early leadership, both acting in varying managing and
Dan Winters surveys a shifting landscape—his own backyard. On a mid-August morning, the 59-year-old photographer, author, and filmmaker is in the kitchen of his Austin, Texas, home, detailing the impending relocation of his studio and workshop (headquartered in a converted post office, general store, and Texaco station 25 miles south in unincorporated Driftwood) to just steps from his front porch. Anyone who has worked with Winters—presidents, astronauts, publishers of the country’s most influential publications—could grasp the challenge, given Winters’ lifelong accumulation of equipment, archives, and personal collections, which range from apiaries (beehives) to pieces of Apollo spacecraft.
The shuffling of workspaces feels natural, almost expected, given the rotational history of his surroundings. Winters’ home, which he; his wife, Kathryn; and son, Dylan, moved to from Los Angeles in 2000, was built in downtown Austin in 1938 and later transported to this quiet enclave on the north side of town circa 1975. Their detached garage will soon supplant the Driftwood studio. It was originally Winters’ model-building workshop, but that migrated a decade ago to a pitched-roof room on the second floor. The model shop is a place of refuge cocooned in paint sets, kit parts, and books on the artistry of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Dan Winters’ first serious profession was that of a motion picture special effects model builder. He still builds miniatures today, finding the act of creating for the sake of creating rewarding. / Photo by Dan Winters
Winters vividly recalls the first model he ever built (a British SE5a biplane), around age 6, with his father, Larry Winters—a welder from Ohio who moved the family to Ventura, California, in 1959. “I would ask him to draw me something, an airplane or a rocket, and it would be on the breakfast table when I’d get up in the morning for school,” Winters said from his own breakfast table. “He would also make little spaceships out of wine corks and put screws in them or paper clips for skids. He’d leave them as little surprises.”
Seeing Possibility
Model-building has been a constant in Winters’ life. “When you start a model,” he explained, “the only thing that exists is your intent and whatever tools and materials you need. You work through the thing, create it, and then it exists. You will it into being. There’s an unbelievable satisfaction in that. In the ability to see what the model is going to be before it gets to a point of unification.”
Growing up, Winters remembers the yard on the working farm where he was raised as always strewn with spare parts, and he was often tasked with repurposing them. “The engine in our Volkswagen threw a rod, and we had to rebuild the whole thing,” he recalled. He assisted his father on nights and weekends, staving off resentment for missing idle time with his friends. “I remember the weekend we put the motor back in. We had it on a jack, and my dad slid it in, and I had to balance it until it speared the spline of the transaxle. He got in and pushed the clutch and it started up—I mean, right up. We took it for a drive, even though the bumper and deck lid were off. I remember driving down the street and reflecting on what it took to do that. As a kid, it was way out of my wheelhouse. But seeing that it was possible to do that was massive.”
In 1978, Winters’ father drove his 16-year-old son 50 miles to Van Nuys to visit Apogee, a special-effects company operated by John Dykstra, the Oscar-winning effects supervisor on Star Wars. Winters had cold-called Steve Sperling, who ran the office, and sent several photographs of his model spaceships by mail. A tour with Grant McCune, chief model maker on Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, was arranged. As Winters wrote in his 2014 book, Road to Seeing, “Once inside, it was surreal to see the same model shop firsthand that I’d studied in dozens of photographs published in movie magazines. I was captivated by the artistry I witnessed at every turn…. I cannot describe the profound inspiration and affirmation this visit gave me.”
Road to Seeing by Dan Winters explores his journey to becoming a photographer and significant moments in his career.
In the months that followed, Winters’ mailbox remained packed with special-order plastics, and his fleet of scratch-built spaceships grew. The photos of his progress eventually led two Apogee veterans to recommend him for employment at Design Setters, an effects house in Burbank. Through a work-experience program during his senior year, Winters attended two classes in the morning, then drove to the San Fernando Valley to build models, including one for the Neil Young film Human Highway. It was a creative utopia disguised as a pass/fail.
This portrait of actor Denzel Washington, seated in a set singlehandedly constructed by Dan Winters and published in the New York Times Magazine in 1992, was an inflection point in Winters’ career, opening the door to decades of world-class editorial and portrait work. / Photo by Dan Winters
After attending college at Moorpark, studying abroad in Munich, and assisting for photographer Chris Callis in New York City, Winters began incorporating his skills as a model builder and production designer into his portraiture, creating fictitious worlds unique to each image. An assignment to photograph Denzel Washington for the New York Times Magazine in 1992 was instrumental. Winters stayed up through the night and singlehandedly built a forced-perspective set that evoked the rural outposts documented by photographer Walker Evans during the Depression. The set also emphasized the body position of a seated Washington, whose hands were resting against his dark suit, causing his fingertips to pop. The secret, in a sense, was the human touch.
Winters’ subjects have included Ryan Gosling (above), the Dalai Lama, Tupac Shakur, Helen Mirren, and Fred Rogers, who, according to Winters, “treated the photo shoot sacredly.” He’s also photographed two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama; his portrait of Obama is featured prominently as the back jacket of the president’s memoir, A Promised Land. / Photo by Dan Winters
Another World
This approach carries through Winters’ latest and most immersive project, the film Tone, which he wrote, directed, and photographed. It’s a love story set in a dystopian future where a laborer—the eponymous Tone, whose vocal cords have been stripped by a surveillance state—returns to Earth from Mars and helps heal another broken soul. At nearly 40 minutes, the project far exceeds the scope of Winters’ previous short-subject documentaries and music videos, and visualizing both the earthbound and cosmic elements of the story demanded extensive model and miniature work.
The majority of those Mars miniatures, both piecemeal and whole, still reside in Winters’ Driftwood studio. (Before driving from his home for a studio tour, he cautioned not to crush a box of spare plastics on the car seat, which a hobby shop owner had recently reserved for him. It was an F/A-18C Hornet kit affixed with a handwritten Post-it note that read: WINTERS DAN PARTS GIFT.) Built in 1903 as a post office and general store, the sandstone building in Driftwood expanded in 1942 to accommodate a feed store. A subsequent owner extended that addition, turning a water cistern out back into an interior structure, surrounded by closets, one of which Winters converted to a darkroom. The facade is adorned with a defunct fire-engine-red Texaco gravity pump, occasionally confusing gas-strapped passers-by on the highway.
| A Photographer’s Thoughts on a Photograph |
 Portrait of Charles Batchelor, "First Photograph Made with Incandescent Light," 1880 / THF253728 |
| “As a practitioner of the craft of photography, I frequently employ the use of artificial light when making my photographs, the distinction being that the light emanates from a manmade source and not from the sun. |
Inside, Winters stands beside a bay of humming computer monitors with a Topo Chico. The cold bottle of sparkling water is perfect for slaking thirst and, as tradition holds, providing the next building block in a backyard pile of empties he’s dubbed Mount Topo. Through hundreds of annual deposits, the glass mountain now hosts a rotating colony of pill bugs, snakes, silverfish, and eleodes (beetles). It’s another world within worlds on the studio grounds, where nature and Winters’ collection of artifacts from nearly two centuries of photographic history meet the realities of an increasingly digitized future.
The encroachment of the elements proved calamitous in 2020, when winds clocking 75 mph tore at the metal roof and rainfall destroyed thousands of negatives in storage lockers below. While taking solace that well over a million negatives were safe, including those amassed from anonymous collections he’d found at junk stores and paper-goods shows, the incident nonetheless prompted the decampment for his Austin backyard, where proximity alleviates the increasing sense of vulnerability.
With another Topo tossed to the beetles out back, Winters begins detailing the international origins of the books on the shelves lining the original exterior wall of the post office. It called to mind the 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library,” in which German theorist Walter Benjamin wrote, “I have made my most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient.… How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!”
Winters settles on Photography Album 1, edited by Pierre de Fenoyl, purchased at 23 while biking across Australia. “There’s amazing work in it, work that made me feel like photography was boundless,” Winters said. “I was riding from Sydney to Adelaide, and I had two panniers on my bike for storage. I rode that book for 1,300 miles, in a brown paper bag. I still have the bike; it’s at the house.” A casual flip through the book revealed a preserved leaf tucked inside. “We want to have a memory,” Winters added. “Certain objects will anchor us to a place and time.”
Dan Winters considers his desk, an old drafting table, the anchor of his studio. Littered with objects collected over time, he said of this space, “Sitting at the desk provides a connection to my history.” / Photo by Dan Winters
The undisputed anchor of the studio is Winters’ work desk, an old drafting table festooned with his full range of interests. “Sitting at the desk provides a connection to my history,” he said. “I’m inspired by the intrinsic value of these objects. Some have historical significance, certainly, and some are significant to me and my own path in life. Oftentimes they’re just beautiful objects I like to contemplate. One of the drawbacks of the collection is I feel it would be pretty quickly marginalized by whoever was settling my estate. At first glance, it probably looks like junk.”
According to theorist Benjamin, “the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility.” Winters senses the necessity of cataloging these objects in the moment and imparting their meaning. There’s the National Supply badge that belonged to his grandfather, whose company made transmissions for Sherman tanks. Or a rivet from the Golden Gate Bridge, flecks of international orange paint still visible. (Ironworkers presented the rivet ceremoniously to Winters after a photo shoot.)
| Lost in Space | |
 Photo by Dan Winters |  Photo by Dan Winters |
| Among Dan Winters’ desktop mementos are two pieces of equipment from the Apollo program: a pressure transducer (left above) and an RCS check valve assembly, still bagged (right above. Both were procured from a Los Angeles scrap dealer who capitalized on the closure of a Van Nuys plant operated by Rocketdyne, manufacturer of the Saturn V engines. The keepsakes have remained within reach ever since. | |
There’s also a swab attached to a wine cork, which is in fact a vital tool, one that facilitated a series of portraits for National Geographic that quickly became among Winters’ most widely seen images. Published in May 2021 and intended to draw attention to World Bee Day, the subject was actress Angelina Jolie covered in bees. Before the shoot, Winters and friend Konrad Bouffard contacted Ronald Fischer, an entomologist now in his 90s, who was “bearded” in bees for an iconic Richard Avedon portrait in Davis, California, in 1981. They also reached Avedon’s on-set beekeeper, who still had the cork swab he’d used to dot Fischer’s skin with queen-bee pheromone, thus attracting a swarm. As a lifelong beekeeper, Winters was honored to use the very same swab for his shoot and to be told he could keep the cork among his treasures.
It was hard not to draw a line to the cork-and-paper-clip spaceships Winters’ father left for him in the mornings, the ones that inspired him both to build and to collect. Asked if a cork ship was docked on his desk, Winter was convinced, though he couldn’t pinpoint one. “I know I have one in these boxes,” he said, sifting through cardboard stacks. He reminded himself to check later. For now, the day was still young, and the sun was out. In the shadow of Mount Topo, this message in a bottle would remain open, awaiting its cork.
James Hughes is a writer and editor based in Chicago. This post was adapted from an article in the January–May 2022 issue of The Henry Ford Magazine.
Texas, The Henry Ford Magazine, space, photography, photographs, movies, making, California, by James Hughes, books, 21st century, 20th century
From left: Inventors Claire Kinnaman, Anna Gareau, and Cooper Dyson are Team Scandicapped, the winner of the President’s Choice award at the 2019 Invention Convention U.S. Nationals. The team was led by Nancy Ernstes, Cobb County Schools K-12 InVenture, in Georgia. / Photo by Nick Hagen
Invention Convention Worldwide invites students to solve problems and invent through hands-on, real-world, project-based learning activities. In 2019, more than 100,000 K-12 inventors competed at the school level. Winners advanced to state competitions, hoping to be one of the 492 granted access to Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation for Invention Convention U.S. Nationals. A trio of young inventors and their invention, Scandicapped, won the competition’s coveted 2019 President’s Choice award from The Henry Ford’s President and CEO Patricia Mooradian.
Scandicapped, invented by fifth-graders Anna Gareau, Claire Kinnaman, and Cooper Dyson, has a simple premise. Using an accessible parking sign fitted with LED lights and RFID technology found in pet microchips, drivers would be discouraged from illegally parking in reserved spaces.
According to the trio, it’s an idea that came to life in their classroom at Cheatham Hill Elementary in Marietta, Georgia. First proposed by Anna, Scandicapped’s inspiration is personal, a problem she identified within her own family, since her sister has hydrocephalus and uses a wheelchair. Her family’s frustration in parking lots is constant, Anna said.
For five months, the three fifth-graders brainstormed after school to define the problem and outline their design solution and concepts—all under their teacher’s guidance. Final iterations of Scandicapped allow a fitted solar-powered sign to read a chip embedded in a driver’s placard or license plate. When the plate’s chip is verified, the parking sign’s LED lights glow green to indicate legal parking. When a car is parked illegally, the sign’s LED lights glow red to alert drivers of their mistake. If ignored, the continued red flashes also alert the public and law enforcement of the infraction.
The team’s research shows those infractions would get noticed. Within just 35 minutes of observing their elementary school’s retrofitted accessible parking signs one school morning, nine violations occurred. “They were mostly younger, teenagers,” said Claire. “They don’t really know how much their actions can affect people.” What’s also interesting about their test, she added, was how half of drivers who did park illegally moved their vehicle when the prototype sign glowed red.
Team Scandicapped followed much of the protocol The Henry Ford has applied to its own innovation learning framework, Model i, when working on their ideation. Model i connects habits of innovators and actions of innovation to provide an interdisciplinary language and approach to learning. Habits such as empathy and collaboration, along with actions such as defining the problem, designing solutions, and optimizing through feedback and iteration, are within the framework. All of these practices and processes were a major reason why the Scandicapped inventors won the competition’s President’s Choice award. “I was shocked and amazed,” said Cooper of the honor.
Leadership at The Henry Ford was equally amazed at the resourcefulness of Team Scandicapped. “The work of Cooper, Claire and Anna so closely embodies the mission of this great institution,” said Patricia Mooradian, president and CEO of The Henry Ford, “reflecting on the fact that 10 percent of the population is disabled in some way and we have to do what we can to make the world more accessible to everyone.”
Since 2019, the Invention Convention Worldwide program has grown to support 147,000 K-12 student inventors. To ensure the safety of students, their families, and everyone involved, the competition was hosted virtually in 2020 and 2021. After two years, Invention Convention Worldwide is excited to welcome students back to The Henry Ford June 1–3, 2022, for Raytheon Technologies Invention Convention U.S. Nationals 2022. We are looking forward to celebrating the creativity and ingenuity of these students this summer!
This post was adapted from an article by Susan Zweig in the January–May 2020 issue of The Henry Ford Magazine.
education, accessibility, Model i, by Susan Zweig, innovation learning, cars, childhood, inventors, Invention Convention Worldwide, The Henry Ford Magazine
Katharine Wright and Wilbur Wright Preparing to Fly, Pau, France, February 15, 1909 / adapted from THF112388
It’s an old story: women keeping the home fires burning for their loved ones. Katharine Wright handled household responsibilities for her family, giving her brothers, Wilbur and Orville, the freedom to focus on achieving the first heavier-than-air flight in 1903. Yet along the way, she pushed a few boundaries of her own—experiencing things most women of her era did not.
After her mother’s death in 1889, Katharine took over running the Wright home for her father and older brothers at age 15. Later, after Wilbur and Orville had established their aircraft company, she also handled much of their business correspondence.
Katharine Wright and Harriet Silliman Washing Dishes, Wright Home, Dayton, Ohio, 1896 / THF243313
Unlike her quiet mother, Katharine was spunky, encouraged by her father to seek education and a profession. She did, graduating not only from high school—something most people, men or women, didn’t do at this time—but college as well, which was even rarer. She was, in fact, the only Wright child to complete college.
A Latin teacher at Dayton’s Steele High School, she walked away from her beloved profession to help Orville convalesce after a plane crash in 1908. A year later, she would join her two brothers in France as they held public demonstrations of their latest airplane. Unafraid and heedless of the February cold, she made several flights with Wilbur at the controls, flying longer and farther than any American woman at that time. Witty and extroverted, she also delighted foreign reporters with her unaffected Midwestern manner and quickly became a celebrity in her own right—the only woman ever invited to a dinner at the Aéro-Club de France during aviation’s early years.
Orville Wright, Katharine Wright, and Wilbur Wright in France, 1909 / THF112379
She later would serve on the board of Oberlin College, devote time to causes such as women’s suffrage, and eventually marry for the first time at age 52. With domestic responsibilities always tugging, she never stopped pushing boundaries.
Jeanine Head Miller is Curator of Domestic Life at The Henry Ford. This post was adapted from an article in the June–December 2019 issue of The Henry Ford Magazine.
Ohio, 20th century, 19th century, Wright Brothers, women's history, The Henry Ford Magazine, home life, flying, by Jeanine Head Miller
