Plays well with others

A designer fuses curiosity and cabinetry to create interactive exhibits for children's museums.

By ALICIA CALDWELL, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 1, 2003

			[Times photo: Fred Victorin]
			At his warehouse, Charlie Shaw plays with a toy car motor and wheel base kids will use to build their own K'Nex race cars to zip around a track at Great Explorations.

PINELLAS PARK -- Charlie Shaw sees himself as an accidental entrepreneur.

While the 1990s produced a hard-driving platoon of dot commandos and real estate moguls, Shaw quietly worked in a Pinellas Park warehouse, melding his curiosity about science with his cabinetry skills to create a company that makes exhibits for children's museum designer Hands On! Inc.

The result has been a spate of award-winning projects and a partnership that has flourished, buoyed not only by shared creativity but by a nationwide boom in children's interactive museums.

"I never thought I would be this successful because I didn't care that much," said Shaw, 46, who grew up in Gulfport and graduated from Boca Ciega High School in 1975. "But now that I'm here, I like it."

The partnership between C.W. Shaw Inc. and Hands On! began with the original Great Explorations -- The Hands-on Museum that opened in St. Petersburg in 1987.

"We sort of stepped in and rebuilt and repaired the stuff," Shaw said. "The next time they sold a job, they just let us build the whole thing."

Now, Shaw is building the reincarnation of Great Explorations, which is scheduled to open March 30 at Sunken Gardens in St. Petersburg, a longtime tourist attraction that is being refurbished by the city. Many of the new exhibits have been moved to the new space, but Shaw still has a lie-o-meter and parts of a tennis ball launcher in his warehouse.

Soft-spoken in his office, Shaw becomes bright-eyed and animated as he walks through the warehouse, explaining how an exhibit works and what it is designed to elicit from its young patrons.

"We're hoping this will intrigue children, and when they're back in the classroom, it'll click and they'll ask questions," he said. "They're there to have fun."

On a recent warehouse tour, Shaw showed off the toy car motor and wheel base kids will use to build their own K'Nex race cars that will zip around a track at the new Great Explorations. And he showed how Styrofoam bits in a long glass tube would undulate in a series of wave patterns when a museumgoer turns knobs that generate sound.

Creating a haven for fun learning has been on the minds of those whose grassroots efforts have doubled the number of children's interactive museums since 1990.

There are more than 215 children's museums nationwide, and another 80 that are on the drawing boards, said Janet Rice Elman, executive director of the Association of Children's Museums, a Washington nonprofit.

"There absolutely has been an upward momentum," said Rice Elman. "We really feel there is a very strong desire to give children an informal learning opportunity outside schools."

The first children's museum, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, opened more than a century ago, but Rice Elman said Michael Spock -- son of famous baby doctor Benjamin Spock -- did groundbreaking work at Boston Children's Museum for two decades ending in the 1980s.

"He's really the visionary we credit with leading the way in children's interactive," Rice Elman said.

The work of Shaw and Hands On! Inc., which is based in St. Petersburg, was recognized last summer with a gold award in the largest industrial design competition in the United States.

The Industrial Design Excellence Awards, co-sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America and BusinessWeek magazine, received 1,100 entries in 2002 and awarded 41 gold awards.

Shaw and Hands On! won for a 60,000-square-foot children's museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The judges called the display a "unique interactive science learning center as the main anchor" for Odyssey, a multipurpose entertainment center in Belfast.

Greg Belew, Hands On! executive director, said there were other elements about the Belfast project that made it special. Mindful of the longstanding, bloody strife between Catholics and Protestants, Hands On! and Shaw tried to make exhibits that would encourage children to communicate and cooperate.

"For us, it was a real opportunity to bring the communities together," said Belew. "The term that was coined for it was that it was an oasis of peace. It was a social gathering place where both Protestants and Catholics could come together."

One of the exhibits, Belew said, features a 300-pound metal pendulum on a 15-foot long chain. It is surrounded by a 2 1/2-foot tall fence. Children are given tiny magnets on strings that they throw in an effort to attach them to the pendulum. Then, they try to direct the pendulum, which has a laser at the bottom, over graphics that are on the floor. But to effectively move the pendulum, children have to work together.

"If everybody pulls in different directions at the same time, the magnets pop off," Belew said.

The concept involved in the exhibit bears striking similarities to the principles that guide the relationship between Shaw and Hands On!. The companies have no contractual binding, but rather operate on a handshake and trust.

Shaw's company, which employs 8-10 people depending on the workload, does jobs for no one else, and Hands On! sends all of its projects to Shaw.

"If we took Charlie out of the equation, the way we approach projects would be very, very different," Belew said. "I cannot imagine doing it without him.'

Shaw, who is self-taught, outsources very little, doing everything including electronics, machine shop work, welding and even building the stools that patrons sit on in the museums. They once bought some stools that just weren't sturdy enough for heavy commercial use, Belew said.

"Kids are about the toughest customers that you have," he said.

Shaw and Belew said the element that makes their operation so successful -- they've done about 30 projects around the world -- is the way Shaw is involved in the conceptual and design process before the building even gets started.

"In our relationship, it's seamless," Belew said.

It has been successful enough that Shaw, who started out two decades ago in 900 square feet of warehouse space for his cabinetry business, now has 14,000 square feet. As each job comes in, Shaw works with the Hands On! staff to create a vision, a budget and a construction plan.

"That's part of what makes us so successful," Shaw said. "We don't waste a lot of energy fighting over change orders. We just do it and live with the consequences."

-- Alicia Caldwell can be reached at Alicia@sptimes.com or (727)893-8145.

Grand Opening

Great Explorations, The Hands-on Museum has scheduled a free grand opening celebration from noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday, March 30, at its new home at Sunken Gardens, 1825 Fourth St. N., St. Petersburg. After the event, admission will be $8 for adults, $7 for children and seniors, free for children younger than 3

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