Innovation in Bloom

It's More Than An Exhibit, It's Kinetic Artwork

Towering two stories tall, Innovation in Bloom is a vibrant installation that transforms our Innovation Design Process into an unforgettable, hands-on adventure that celebrates creativity, collaboration, and the rich cultural fabric of Silicon Valley.

Visitors launch balls sky-high, watching them soar through twisting air tubes before cascading down a colorful landscape of chutes, reservoirs, and switches inspired by the Santa Cruz Mountains, East Bay hills, and the local critters that call them home. As the balls travel downward, kinetic flowers bloom to life. The California Poppies, San Jose Roses, Marigolds, Lotuses, and Cherry Blossoms represent cultural stories of the communities that make our region thrive.

Look closer, and you’ll also spot hummingbirds, bees, crows, owls, butterflies, and other native animals woven into the scene. These creatures were chosen both for their connection to our local environment and for the ingenious ways they embody innovation itself. Hummingbirds hover with precision thanks to their astonishing wingbeats. Bees work together in vast, collaborative systems to build hives and sustain their colonies. Crows display extraordinary problem-solving skills, crafting and using tools in the wild. Monarch butterflies navigate epic migrations, while owls and hawks showcase mastery of perception and adaptation. Each animal highlights how creativity, engineering, and resilience are deeply rooted in the natural world around us.

At the base of the exhibit, guests become innovators themselves. Using magnetic tracks, they can design and test their own ball runs, experimenting and iterating just like real engineers. And when multiple creators work together, their collaboration triggers the exhibit’s showstopping surprise: a “brainstorm” of more than 200 balls raining down in a joyful downpour, a spectacular metaphor for the power of collective creativity.

Rooted in place, community, and possibility, Innovation in Bloom is more than an exhibit, it’s a space where curiosity grows, bold ideas take flight, and creativity comes alive.

A Metaphor for the Innovation Design Process

Innovation in Bloom is a hands-on metaphor for how ideas grow through experimentation and creativity. As visitors adjust magnetic ball chutes to change the balls' path, they naturally engage in the same iterative process at the heart of The Tech Interactive’s mission: the Innovation Design Process.

This process, define, imagine, create, test & reflect, and share, is the foundation of our Design Challenge Learning approach, which encourages learners to tackle real-world problems through hands-on exploration and collaboration. Just like the soaring balls in the exhibit, each experiment builds momentum, showing that every adjustment, test, and reimagined path moves us closer to a better solution.

Key Characteristics of The Tech Interactive's Innovation Design Process

Non-Linear
All aspects of the process are important, but there is no fixed sequence to going through these phases. In fact, innovators may engage in multiple phases simultaneously. For example, brainstorming can happen while tinkering with materials.

Hands-On
Manipulation of materials is important to innovation, even when working on abstract ideas. Physically representing our ideas, testing and refining them is not only a lot of fun, but can also result in creative solutions otherwise never explored.

Iterative
Innovators create, test, refine over and over and over. They learn from failure and persevere to find the optimal solution within the criteria and constraints with which they are working.

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Made at The Tech

What makes Innovation in Bloom especially remarkable is the innovation behind it. Over 18 months of prototyping and play-testing went into its design, with every detail shaped by watching how children instinctively wanted to interact with it. Our in-house engineers even invented new mechanisms, such as the custom device that gives the flowers their lifelike sway, ensuring the exhibit’s engineering matched its artistic ambition. The result is a breathtaking fusion of art, technology, and storytelling, built with the same process of imagination and problem-solving that it invites visitors to explore.