"Chips and Changes"-The Development and Impact of the Computer Chip

Abstract

Chips and Changes is an exhibit demonstrating the development and impact of the computer chip. It has been traveling to cities throughout the United States since March 1984, portraying computerchip technology as fundamental and pervasive. Its principal message is that the computer chip represents a technological revolution that now has and will continue to have a major social effect on the way we live, work, play, and think. exhibit was organized by the Association of Science-Technology Centers in Washington, D.C., and developed with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Intel Corporation, among others. design firm, Rogow & Bernstein, clearly wished to avoid conveying a sense of technological determinism. exhibit expresses the idea that this new technology confronts us with choices rather than threats and that it poses problems for people to solve through awareness and action, rather than presenting its audience with visions of a future that, either terrible or wonderful, comes to us independent of our will. This awareness of choice, the avoidance of a simplistic determinism, and the effort to encourage visitors to think actively about the future are visible in many different exhibit elements. Three thousand square feet of space were organized into discrete pavilions, each focusing on a major area of social experience that has been affected by various applications of computer-chip technology. These sections are The Automated Factory, Robots, The Paperless Office, Smart Tools, Home, Health, and Bright Games. Each contains descriptive material, visual displays, and some sort of hands-on demonstration. In addition, there is a continuous slide show, a three-dimensional model of a computer chip, and a display covering the last ten decades of technological innovations which is called When I Was Ten. When I Was Ten is a marvelous display concept, using the words of ten different people to represent the decades from the 1890s to the 1980s. Each remembers the dramatic new technology of his childhood,