“Look at this!” “Look at that!”
“Look over here!”
The Lemelson Center’s new Change Your Game/Cambia tu juego sports exhibit—3,500 square feet of high-tech wow, teeming with some of the most transformative innovations in recent memory—elicits those finger-pointing moments while being uniquely hands-on.
The hands-on part is where you look at something else: you, as you literally touch upon the power of human ingenuity.
This game-changing, interactive display involving the games we play isn’t as much about showing what other people have created as it is revealing the index of your possibilities.
“You’re learning about other inventors, people who invented for sports, but we want visitors to sort of move from there to some self-reflection,” said Eric S. Hintz, PhD and acting director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the site of the exhibit.
“Our educational goal for the exhibition is to say, ‘Hey, look at all these cool stories,’ and then reflect that from people’s own lives: How can I be a game changer in my own life? How can I engage my own inventive creativity?”
Marrying thought and touch
Years in the making—following comprehensive research, as well as the physical machinations of assembling—Change Your Game opened in 2024. It includes 60-plus sports technology inventions from collections throughout America and features six areas of exploration: the introductory Starting Line; four Motivation Zones that each highlight a core motivation for invention in sports—achieving a Competitive Edge, promoting Health and Safety, facilitating Fairness and Accuracy, and enhancing the Fun and Accessibility of sports to diverse participants—and a finishing End Zone.
Each Motivation Zone has an interactive element, often a touchscreen. Hintz used an example to explain how it works.
“When you walk into the gallery, the first motivation that you encounter is Competitive Edge—inventing technologies to help win more games, go faster, jump higher, speed faster. The interactive there is called swimsuit designer, so you put yourself in that role.
“And so, you have a series of decisions to make. Number one, what shape of swimsuit do I want? Do I want a one-piece? Do I want a two-piece? Do I want a tankini?
“The screen in front of you will have a little knob that you turn, like a wheel, and you use it to show you what it looks like, and then you push the button and you select it.”
The user moves through a series of other choices. What kind of fabric? In the very literal sense of “hands on,” visitors can even feel different fabric types to help them make their choice.
If a friend is iterating with you, you can compare your choices, even compete. The purpose is to encourage everyone to react to challenges, problem solve, and better understand how his or her uniquely inventive mind works.
Sports: Inspiring innovation
“There is usually a crowd of people at the swimsuit designer interactive,” said Dr. Joanna Garner.
A research professor and executive director of The Center for Educational Partnerships at Old Dominion University, Dr. Garner worked with the Lemelson Center and Dr. Avi Kaplan, professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Temple University, to research the optimal intentions and processes of the exhibit.
“The interactives are one of my favorite parts,” she said. “Because I’m a psychologist, I just love to see people and that kind of spark or that recognition of their own inventiveness, and see people playing and learning at the same time.”
Dr. Garner said a key component of making choices is “the idea of constraints—how we can’t just choose anything and combine anything in our lives, right? We have to usually have a particular goal that usually must optimize whatever it is that we’re making.”
The immense impact sports has on the world was a primary driver when conceptualizing the exhibit, which dramatically shows how invention and innovative technology have become increasingly essential in athletics.
Hintz, the center’s acting director and a historian focused on the history of science, technology and invention, said sports is broadly identifiable for multiple reasons: “Even if you’re not into sports, you probably have a pair of tennis shoes. You probably have a swimsuit somewhere, right? And someone has to design this stuff. Someone has to invent it.
“The more we thought about it, in every sport even the apparel is associated in some way or another with technology.”
Change Your Game features inventions made for and by athletes, including Gatorade; innovative skateboard and snowboard designs; prostheses and adaptive devices; and helmet safety innovations provided by former NFL star Shawn Springs through his company, Windpact. At a Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation event last year, Springs and Dr. Garner discussed his Crash Cloud technology and what motivated him to invent.
“By my 10th year in the league, I noticed there was a lot of noise around traumatic brain injury,” the 13-year veteran and subject of a December 2020 Inventors Digest cover story told the Lemelson Center in a separate interview. “I became curious about why the technology that my father wore in the 1980s was the very same technology that I was wearing in the NFL more than two decades later, and I was hoping that my kids wouldn’t be wearing this same technology.
“My sons, like I did with my father, took a particular interest in football and wanted to play in college. And right then and there, I knew it was a problem I wanted to solve—to make the game safer for the next generation of athletes.”
The role of inventive identity
In addition to the measured thought processes and planning surrounding the themes that dominate Change Your Game, Drs. Garner and Kaplan conducted post-opening research and prototyping.
Throughout the entire process, much of their work in collaboration with the Lemelson Center has revolved around a term they coined: inventive identity, and how we search for and understand it as part of a deeper understanding of who we are.
Dr. Garner said considerations in the exhibit’s theoretical framework included self-perception—“the kinds of words you would use, characterizations you would assign to yourself. Or it could be about your beliefs about the world and about your ability to be inventive in it. It could be about your inventive purposes and goals that you might have in a particular domain of life.
“And your inventive action possibilities: How can you actually be inventive? What are the strategies that we use? What are the actions we use to be inventive?”
Such enthusiastic self-analysis is part of the Lemelson Center’s broader mission to spark the human drive that can uncover our varied abilities to confront challenges and solve problems. This includes programs and ongoing activities like the neighboring Spark!Lab, another immersive, hands-on space that provides visitors a chance to explore their inner inventor; research fellowships that enable scholars and students to advance our understanding of the history of invention and innovation; and public programs and digital resources to promote invention’s many success stories.
“Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson’s vision for the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation was to create a national home for the stories of invention. They understood that documenting the history of American ingenuity isn’t just about preserving the past; it’s about inspiring the future,” said Rob Schneider, executive director of The Lemelson Foundation. “The Lemelson Foundation’s support for dynamic exhibits like Change Your Game directly reflects this, showcasing how inventors have reshaped our world—from the sports field to the operating room. We are proud to partner with the Smithsonian to foster an appreciation for the central role that invention plays in our lives and to encourage the next generation of innovators.”
Details: invention.si.edu
About the Lemelson Center
Vision: We envision a world in which everyone is inventive and inspired to contribute to innovation.
Mission: The Lemelson Center engages, educates, and empowers the public to participate in technological, economic, and social change. We undertake historical research, develop education initiatives, create exhibitions, and host public programming to advance new perspectives on invention and innovation and to foster interactions between the public and inventors.
