I don't have tons of statistics or great pictures or anything--I suppose those that have them might post them later--but in the meantime I figured I'd give a quick recap of my experience at our open house Friday, before it fades too much further from active memory into the realm of myth and legend.
It was, in short, a great time. We had a fairly good variety of folks wander through, from pre-teens on up. I spent a while fishing out from a small water-filled [STRIKEOUT:crockpot] slow cooker fun little blobs of warm polycaprolactone These I then shoved into the hands of anyone who would take them as they wandered through our conference/presentation/meeting room. It was great seeing folks' reaction to its warm, pliable nature and to listen to them comment about how tough and rigid it is once cooled. It's a very minimalistic but (at least I'd like to think) very representative demonstration of the interactive, collaborative, exploratory, hand's-on environment we try to provide at Interlock to members and guests alike.
I took a bit of a break from running my mouth and from noodling around in the hot water and gooey PCL to watch a short but sweet TOOOL-designed lockpicking slideshow, followed by a lockpicking workshop. Antitree had done the pied-piper trick, drawing a bunch of kids-in-fact and kids-at-heart into the conference room for a short statement of the lock picking rules, a little bit of lock construction and mechanism theory and picking how-to. Then everyone took turns with the several sets of lock picking tools and real locksets for some hand's-on experience. Folks really seemed to have a good time with trying it out.
Elsewhere in the space, all the folks originally promised to appear were around. I can only guess at how awesome their presentations were, but there seemed to be people everywhere. Early on, I was worried no one would make it into the not-a-kitchen for snacks, but that turned out to be not-a-problem.
Not sure how much of the traffic was driven by word-of-mouth versus posted fliers, but I know at least some folks had seen our lead-off part in a feature in the independent weekly tabloid Rochester City Newspaper.
The lead-up to the open house rekindled a fire under some of our 3D printing aspirations. I don't want to give too much away there, but that's been bubbling along these last few weeks. And, in addition to folks who made it on Friday, we've also been having new folks continue to come in for our weekly Open Night. This week, we met John, who brought us some fun new-to-us toys (again, perhaps more on that later, but in the meantime, thanks, John!). Also, we got to meet and talk to (a different, distinct) Joe and Andrew. And so it goes.
If you came to visit us Friday, we hope you liked what you saw and will come back. If you missed it, not to worry: Please keep an eye on our calendar for other events (at least two every week). Or, if you can't make it then, drop us a line and maybe we can work out an appointment for some other time.