Making new realities: Virtual Reality and the Maker Movement
This journey visited Idea Square at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN is one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. CERN IdeaSquare is a dedicated test facility at CERN that hosts detector R&D projects, and facilitates student programs. With maker spaces (Harri Toivonen), and leading-edge digital communication tools, including Virtual Reality (Neal Hartman), Idea Square (Markus Nordberg) is a dynamic space for prototyping and creating products, approaches and partnerships between scientists and communities. This journey explored their approach to labs and innovation.
Virtual Journey
​
We Learned
-
CERN is a physics Lab with a mission to discover what happened a fraction after the Big Bang. Science and research here is trying to shrink the gap between the science and technology developed along the way. The idea at CERN is to develop the next generation scientific technologies.
​​
-
CERN Idea Square brings together Master level students to do Challenged-Based Innovation, bringing design thinking to societal issues using questions like, “How might we…”. From there they look at the problem from many different perspectives, identify the bottlenecks and then develop prototypes that “potentially moon-shoot” solutions to the problem
“We bring design thinking and people together to help solve societal issues.”