Design Recap: Mad Science Fair 2016

Event graphics for Pinterest Engineering’s first Mad Science Fair.

There are many things I enjoy doing. Yin yoga, biking, reading the Sunday NYT Magazine, cooking, etc. But there is one thing I like the best: connecting people through shared passions.

It can be as simple as being a friend matchmaker par excellence, but it’s even more fun for me to connect people at scale. It started with a 2009 camping trip for super talented emerging photographers that turned into an series of creative retreats called Phoot Camp. One attendee said “It’s like living your whole life as a Waldo and then spending a weekend with 40 other Waldos.” I also helped start sister event Eat Retreat for leaders in the food community. Since I’ve joined Pinterest I’ve gotten to help host two years of employee conference Knit Con where anyone could teach a session about their passions, such as Growing Rare Plants from Seeds and Cuttings or Intersectional Feminism, to the rest of the company. One person said “It was like two days of being friends instead of co-workers.”

How do shared passions lead to communities? Well, imagine being in a room full of people who recently read a bunch of the same books you did and just bought this tool to make this thing that you’ve been thinking about making and have actually a lot of thoughts about that thing you can’t stop thinking about … whoa. It’s like having dozens of amazing first (friend) dates with dozens of people who are also having this with each other.

Attendee-led workshops and skill-sharing allow for people to show themselves — to put up a beacon of sorts — and for others to see it and self-select to join their tribe. Right away, in person. This is a small fun thing that with the right nudges can snowball into a big life-changing soul-feeding stable community thing.

Nothing lights me up more than this. (I even gave a talk about it once.)

The great thing for me is that all of this lines up really well with both Pinterest’s internal culture (I hear co-founder Evan Sharp has said that we hire people with more passions than time) and with our product mission to help people discover and do what they love. This means we’re experimenting with the skill-sharing format for all kinds of different events.

Thanks for reading all that setup. Now to the design recap and pretty pictures part!

We recently set out to host an engineering open house that shared some of this internal culture with the greater community. Halloween is a big deal at Pinterest, so within a few brainstorms we landed on a “Mad Science Fair” to which we would invite hundreds of Bay Area engineers.

The gif I made for the invite.

Our first step was to reach out to our internal maker club and encourage them to teach sessions. They did not disappoint, throwing out ideas like a robot making and sumo showdown session, beer-brewing robots and headphone making. Not to mention a tech talk on machine learning and an intro to the festivities from our new head of engineering, Li Fan.

Pinterest engineer Kevin Grandon led a session on SumoBots that attendees got to assemble.

Pinterest engineer and audiophile James Rubinstein led a session on making your own headphones.

Pinterest head of engineering Li Fan kicking things off.

Co-workers also put me in touch with the geekiest coffee brewers and food scientists they knew, along with a beloved neighborhood group who needed carnival games made for an upcoming kid’s Halloween event.

Lena Kwak, former R&D chef for the French Laundry, geeks out about food science at the Pinterest Mad Science Fair 2016.

Anthony Sheedy of Rucksack Roastery brought refractometers, scales and phone apps to taste and talk through the science of coffee.

Pinterest employee Evelyn Obamas led four stations four volunteers to make help make carnival games for SOMA Youth Collaborative’s Halloween carnival.

My fellow brand design team member and CCA professor Tim Belonax was kind enough to teach folks the ropes of using our in-house risograph to mix-and-match design and print an event poster.

Artist Robb Godshaw shared his Strange Lenses exhibit, also a public art installation on Market Street.

With a theme like Mad Science Fair, the graphics were super fun to put together. Plus we got to collaborate with my dear friend Steph Goralnick who brought a ton of great ideas to the project, along with custom designing this crazy elaborate stage pattern.

Lightbulb patterned vinyl graphic painstakingly designed by Steph Goralnick. Notice no visible seams to the pattern — she’s good, and so were the vinyl installers.

Tote bag and t-shirt graphics.

Here’s a close-up of the gif that was on the TVs.

A quick gif I designed for the TV screens in the event space.

We also owe a debt to our event production team A2E. They did many many many things for us, but my favorite was the way they combined these props we picked out at the Prop Shop with the floral from Mission de Flores and some heads in jars into this amazingly styled setup.

Real vintage electronics, test tubes, and heads in jars styled by A2e really helped set the tone.

My favorite installer/handyman Jon Stevens built a reusable giant trifold poster for the event.

And of course we had a shared Pinterest board with our amazingly creative in-house culinary team.

Oh-so-clever watermelon brain and puking jack o lantern put together by the PinChefs.

All in all, it was an amazingly fun event to put together. And did all those shared passions create any new communities? Not yet, but I get the feeling this is the beginning of something. Thanks for reading and maybe see you at the next one.

Thanks to Northern Lights digital imaging for installing this vinyl graphic I designed. Thanks Jeff Cable for event photography. Thanks Nicole Lee, Malorie Lucich, Annie Tsang, Brad Bishop and lots more Pinterest folks who worked really hard on this event. Thanks all the people I’m obviously forgetting.