This is the first project in our i,maker programme. The idea is that anyone can come into our space, grab a wrench and build a scooter from scratch. Why? Because it is through the process of making that we make sense of our world and ourselves. The programme will take place in October 2011 and will last for one week. If you’d like to take part, please keep an eye on our News page, as well as our Home page.

Beau Lotto is working with the wonderful Anna Starkey on a series of children’s books that explore the nature of perception and how we can take ownership of what we see (and don’t see). Bee and Me is the first in the series of books for children.

Beau Lotto has been commissioned by Oxford University Press to write a popular science book about how and why we see colour as we do… and why it tells us something fundamental about who we are.

How do we enable large numbers of children (AND their teachers and schools) to become true creators of science without losing the intimacy that is required to transform lives en route? As with all our work, the i,scientist community is a research project that will be attempting to answer this question.

Lottolab has many aims and ambitions, one of which is to be a space (conceptual and physical) where people can become creators of science… through play. We’re therefore hoping to create a ‘club’ whose members will have access to the lab at their own will. But we’ve really no idea where this will lead… we would like the members to figure that out for us instead.

Physical interaction is the route via which the brain makes sense of the world and oneself in that world. Making, then, is the deeply intuitive process by which we create what we see, hear, feel and touch. ‘Making Chocolate’ will be the second of our i’maker projects. The project is being created in collaboration with cocoa bean growers in Ecuador.

Beau Lotto, in collaboration with Dave Strudwick, is developing ambitious plans to build on lottolab’s existing My School programme in order to create a new school called My School for Inspiring Talents (MySFIT) – one that aims to engender what is fundamental to well-being (and good science)… playfulness, openness, adaptability and empathy. The plan is to apply those principles of science to education, and in MySFIT specifically for disadvantaged young people.

Innovation requires seeing the world – and oneself – uniquely, but this is hard to do, especially within institutions. We are therefore creating a number of workshops for the creative industries to apply our understanding of perception to foster innovation in their own fields. These workshops take full advantage of our wonderful lab space deep inside one of the world’s leading public institutions: London’s Science Museum.

The language of fashion has the potential to transform lives for the positive, since fashion is something we participate in every morning when we open the wardrobe (consciously or otherwise). Beau Lotto, in collaboration with one of the UK’s leading fashion designers, Helen Story, aims to ‘redefine’ the catwalk and what it represents.

Imagine the orchestra, not laid out in front of you on a stage, but as a personified wall of sound measuring 25 metres tall by 40 metres wide. Also imagine listening to that human wall of music, not on the ground in seats but moving around, hearing the same live performance from many different perspectives. vEnsemble (or the Vertical Orchestra) is our dream to transform the composition and performance of music through the science of spatial sound perception.

What is theatre? How does a director direct? Indeed how does anyone make a decision? Living Narratives is a lottolab installation/experience created in collaboration with the super-energetic and creative Danish theatre Director Sidsel Bech (currently based in Liverpool). Living Narratives involves tens – even hundreds of people in a space with two simple tasks: stay in the space and never stop walking.