Science isn’t just the domain of engineering students, and experiments don’t always need a campus lab. A popular passion for science is now being fostered by some creative online endeavors, combining science and creativity in novel ways.

“How come that globe is floating?” “Why can’t I fill this cup?” Customers stare at the items in front of them, amazed. From the other end of the store ring out the sounds of laughter as a group of children kneel down and stare at a sandglass as the sand trickles through, creating breathtaking shapes below.

Hanging above the door of Mr. Sci’s Science Toy Factory is the business’s logo: a cartoon version of the profile of founder Kevin Lin, with the words “Science is Fun!” underneath. Lin, who is also the director of Yu­ma­man Creative & Design, explains that science often gives the impression of being difficult to understand, but with a bit of creative design, it can become both fun and beautiful. “And a lot of creative ideas start with science,” Lin says.

Figure 1 : Mr. Sci’s Science Toy Factory founder Kevin Lin aims to make science fun through well-designed, entertaining products. The photo shows a Stirling heat engine.

Reengaging the inner child

Having grown up with a high-school science teacher for a father and surrounded by children’s books on science and nature, Lin is no stranger to the field. He still remembers playing with a Stirling heat engine as a child, and believes that many other adults similarly remember their childhood fascination with science.

After getting his start in interior design, in 2008 Lin set up an online store called Mr. Sci’s Science Toy Factory, aiming to bring a designer’s creativity and eye to science and creating fun, interesting things that would reignite that very hands-on childhood fascination with science.

There are a number of similar operations in other countries, such as Japan’s Otona no Kagaku magazine and US website ThinkGeek, focused on DIY science toys for adults or on science-inspired creative products. “Science design” in Taiwan, though, is still in its early days, and so such products are rarely made locally, meaning Lin has had to look abroad to find products.

Lacking enough staff, Lin and his wife Qian Yun­yun had to make use of their free time around their design work to search for information online and travel abroad to attend gift and design shows, and even magic exhibitions, in search of products.

Having traveled the world and accumulated over 400 products in fields like aviation, natural science, and mathematics, Lin finally launched the website. Many of the more novel products make use of scientific concepts, like a faux-antique zoetrope that exploits persistence of vision, or a pen holder in which the pen sits on a cushion of pressurized air.

Exploring the unknown personally

Lin was convinced that his creative idea and website would engage the curiosity of potential shoppers, but in the first six months that the store was online, the anticipated flood of customers turned out more like a trickle. Then one day Lin handed one of his products over to a friend to look at, and seeing his friend’s awed reaction, Lin realized that the fun of science comes from getting hands-on about solving mysteries and exploring the unknown.

And so in 2012, Mr. Sci’s Science Toy Factory made the leap from virtual to actual with the opening of three stores, two in Tai­pei and one in Hsin­chu. Lin made use of his interior design experience, creating stores full of lights and metal with a very steampunk air. It can almost feel like stepping back into Edison’s lab.

Uncommon, curious products like the “Butterfly Jar,” in which a fake butterfly flies around like the real thing with a light tap on the jar, an elegant faux-antique sundial, or the “Magnetic Sand­glass” with its fascinating black-sand shapes, do wonders at drawing in passersby. After two years in business, Mr. Sci’s customer base has expanded beyond the ­researchers and designers that it originally targeted, to include the general public.

In the past, Lin says, science was mostly confined to the halls of academia, but by building a bridge between science and design, he has been able to take science from the seemingly esoteric to something everyone can get involved in.

PanSci plugs the holes

Another online operation seeking to bring science into the popular consciousness is the website PanSci, founded in 2010.

“The mainstream media in Taiwan really don’t cover science news in a way aimed at laypeople, so PanSci was set up with the goal of transforming science from something abstruse into something everyone can follow. We want to fill that gap in Taiwanese science coverage,” says Portnoy ­Zheng, one of PanSci’s founders.

Zheng, a 33-year-old holder of degrees in English and telecommunications, adds that this gap in coverage of science can lead to online fora being packed with incorrect information. For example, recently a photograph of a polar bear which had supposedly starved to death swept the Internet, with many believing that the bear, at that point little more than skin and bones, was a victim of global warming. In reality, the bear most likely was just old.

While PanSci may have big ambitions, the site is actually the result of another failure. In 2010, ­Zheng began work on a project for a site on biomedicine for the Executive Yuan’s Technology Advisory Group. Due to a combination of Zheng’s inexperience and poor communication between the two sides, eventually the plan was a bust, but that aborted site would become the forerunner of PanSci.

Figure 2 : Interesting aspects of science can be found all around us. Through products like model hypercubes, brain-themed coasters, and playing cards with a 3D effect, science comes to life with color and fun.

Convinced of the demand for popular science news in Taiwan, ­­Zheng and co-founder Tim Shyu, chair of the Association of Digital Culture, decided to keep the site they had and transform it into Taiwan’s first popular-science-focused news site.

Ordinary topics, extraordinary figures

Zheng is tasked with checking the readability of the pieces the site publishes, as well as developing topics the public may find interesting. PanSci has a team of five editors and nearly 50 regular contributors, including several well-known popular science bloggers and young researchers from institutions like National Taiwan University. Over its four-plus years, PanSci has published over 4000 articles.

The site’s articles combine hot topics, current events, and popular science, injecting life into science and covering topics that relate to the lives of its readers.

PanSci’s series of reports on ractopamine in 2012 set a record for the site, with some 30,000 to 40,000 clicks in one day. Similarly, when Japanese drama series Han­­zawa ­Naoki became popular in Taiwan, ­PanSci published a piece on the show with a cognitive psychology bent, “Han­zawa Naoki and the Psychology of Revenge”; and as the Alfonso Cuarón film Gravity made a splash at the Oscars, the site republished excepts from the Chinese translation of a Focus magazine article entitled “How to Survive a Space Disaster.” Both pieces received rave reviews online.

Combining virtual and real

As its popularity grew, PanSci expanded into the off­line world, launching the “Micro Idea Collider” series of events and inviting graduate students as well as researchers from prominent institutions like National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica to explore the science in ordinary life. So far, over 500 Micro Idea Colliders have been held.

Last year, PanSci also developed several sciency products of its own, like decorations with the periodic table on them and T-shirts adorned with images of ancient fossils, albeit in limited numbers. Although the site is still finding its way toward profitability, ­Zheng hopes to point the operation toward a combination of science and creative work.

Thanks to the creative ideas of people like Kevin Lin and Portnoy ­Zheng, and the power of the Internet, the gap between the scientific world and everyday people is being narrowed. If science has always seemed like a pile of letters, numbers, and confusion to you, why not check out Mr. Sci’s or PanSci, get your hands on some creative and cool science toys, and rediscover that childhood fascination with experimentation?

(photos by Chuang Kung-ju/tr. by Geof Aberhart)