Inclusivity and imagination at La Nube
La Nube, El Paso's groundbreaking and inclusive STEAM centre, will open to the public on Saturday 10 August 2024. La Nube is a hybrid museum and science El Paso's La Nube, a hybrid museum and science centre, is set to open to the public on 10 August 2024. Stephanie Otero, vice president of operations for the El Paso Community Foundation and interim CEO of the museum, is responsible for the project. She shares her passion for education and community needs in an innovative, hands-on activities. The museum will feature four floors of educational exhibits connected by a 50-foot-tall climber. The El Paso community was instrumental in creating a strategic plan for the building and building, following a 32 public meetings with the community. The project was part of a larger effort to build a quality-of-life bond, which would add some funds since the original city was warned that insufficient funds would be needed.
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La Nube, El Paso’s groundbreaking and inclusive STEAM centre, will open to the public on Saturday 10 August 2024.
La Nube is a hybrid museum and science centre where children—and, in fact, people of all ages—are encouraged to use their imaginations to embark on new learning adventures and explore fascinating, hands-on activities, including sensory sandboxes and giant synthesisers. Four floors of educational exhibits are connected by a 50-foot-tall climber.
Stephanie Otero is vice president of operations for the El Paso Community Foundation, leader of the private side of a public-private partnership bringing La Nube Bay to fruition, and interim CEO of the museum. She spoke to blooloop about its journey and what people can expect from the innovative, inclusive space.
“If I handed you my resume, you would say there’s nothing on there that makes me qualified to do what I’m doing,” she jokes. Otero, who has a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in music, played in symphonies and taught music:
“Then I took some time off to raise children. During that time, I got very involved in education and the educational needs in our region,” she comments. “The president of the Foundation saw that passion and the volunteer work I was doing. Since the El Paso Community Foundation was interested in being more thoughtful and impactful in its education funding and projects, I was asked if I would be interested.”
In 2011, she started working part-time in the education space on the philanthropy side:
“In 2016, Eric [Pearson] came to me and said, ‘I think we’re going to build a children’s museum; I need you to come on full-time and project-manage the private side of this.’
“I don’t have decades of experience running museums. But throughout my career, I have gained skills that I’ve been able to utilise in this position. I didn’t come from the museum world. Still, I do have a passion for our community, for education, for figuring out ways to make an impact in our educational ecosystem, and a commitment that our community deserves a world-class, state-of-the-art facility, just like any other major city.”
“In 2012, 76% of El Pasoans voted for a quality-of-life bond. That bond included a lot of little projects around the city – parks, pools, things like that – and three signature projects. One of those signature projects was a children’s museum.
“If you fast forward to 2016, that quality-of-life bond was all sitting there; nothing had yet happened. Some stakeholders in the community came to the president of the El Paso Community Foundation and said, ‘We think the Children’s Museum is the most important project. Not only will it have an educational impact, but it’s going to have an economic one, both for tourism and when businesses are looking to relocate and looking at quality-of-life amenities.’
“At that point, there was no children’s museum, no science centre, and no natural history museum.”
The El Paso Community Foundation initially undertook to do three things:
“We would do an architect contest to determine who would design the building. Our community desired it to be an architectural statement rather than just having a simple box or taking over an old library, which often happens with children’s museums.
“We would search for the first executive director. We found Paul Kortenaar. Unfortunately, the Ontario Science Center then stole him from us,” she jokes, conceding: “It’s his hometown and one of the top science centres in the world – it proves we made an amazing choice.
“Thirdly, probably the part we’re most proud of, we would create a strategic master plan.”
The team spent six months engaging with the community.
“We started with 32 public meetings,” she says. “We continued stakeholder meetings every week for six months and met for 90 minutes once a week with our exhibit designers. It was important to the El Paso Community Foundation that the community drove this process. We like to say that La Nube was built by the community, for the community.”
At the end of that master planning phase, the Foundation was supposed to hand the architect and plan over to the city, which would add some funds since the original quality-of-life bond would be insufficient.
“The city warned us that because of bureaucracy and the way that government works, this would be a slow process that would get more expensive. They felt this wasn’t the best way to approach the project and suggested doing it on the private side.”
A year and a lot of lawyers later, she adds:
“We created an LLC to mix quality-of-life bond and taxpayer dollars with privately raised dollars. The project is managed by me in this entity. The original quality-of-life bond was for $19.2 million; the city agreed to double this. That took us to around $39 million, taking a provision that 2% has to be saved for a public art project into account. The remaining $72 million has been raised on the private side.”
This is, she agrees, a phenomenal achievement, and a testament to the community’s belief in the project.
“I will be forever grateful for how our community has stepped up,” she comments. “People have given generously because they believe so strongly in this project. We also provided an opportunity for people to pay over time. The El Paso Community Foundation is cash-fronting through a loan to La Nube while the pledges are paid off.”
“We wanted to open with La Nube completed rather than as a phased project, which some museums are forced to do. The El Paso Community Foundation provided that fiscal foundation to allow people to stretch what they were offering to give to La Nube over time, but ensuring there was the cash to finish the project.”
Regarding the institution’s name, she explains:
“After six months of public engagement, we emerged with the theme Blue Sky. That is rooted in the idea that we live in a community with 300+ blue skies a year. We are also a border region and very much connected to our sister city in Juarez. The sky connects all of us, despite any efforts to separate us in other ways.”
“Blue-sky thinking in the scientific world is visionary, innovative thinking. That’s our hope for visitors who come to La Nube: that they will come out inspired to think that way. The strategic master plan was completed before the selection of the architects. So, we handed them that strategic plan as inspiration.”
From that notion of Blue Sky and all its connotations, Snøhetta came up with a design for a building that looked like a cloud.
“It’s gorgeous in real life,” Otero remarks. “It has glass on the bottom, so it feels as if it’s floating, and iridescent white panels in various shades on the outside lend movement in the sunlight. There are hand-placed LEDs, so at night, it twinkles.
“We released the design of the building to the public and held a public naming opportunity. Because we’re a bilingual community, several different people suggested La Nube – the Cloud. It just felt right, referencing the imaginative cloud games children play: I see a dog, an airplane – and the fact that we want people’s heads to be in the clouds, thinking about things that haven’t been thought of yet. It came together beautifully.”
“The original quality-of-life bond was for a children’s museum, but we decided to be hybrid,” she explains. “100% of La Nube is uniquely designed for El Paso. We didn’t buy anything off the shelf. What we did was research around the best ways to use play to learn.”
This involved partnering with Paso Del Norte Children’s Development Center to discuss child development:
“We have a regionwide commitment with a collective group of nonprofits to increase the number of kinder-ready kiddos and explore how La Nube can support that regional effort. It was important to us that La Nube wasn’t just for birth to eight-year-olds, so we needed to consider how we could age it up so that it would serve the whole community. How do we serve the eight to 12-year-olds? How do we serve the pre-tweens, and how, even, do we serve our high school kiddos?
“When we did those strategic planning meetings, we talked about all those different pieces that were important to us.”
STEAM was positioned firmly at the centre:
“We’re very intentional about STEAM versus STEM,” she comments. “Great scientific innovation doesn’t come without creativity, and creativity comes from the arts, so it was important that the arts were incorporated.”
The team determined that they wanted a purposeful early childhood experience in every zone. In terms of the zone themes:
“These emerged from the conversations with the community. There are nine zones altogether. Some people said that La Nube should feel, sound, and look like El Paso and that we need to celebrate our region. An equally strong group in our community said, ‘No, it needs to be global. We have so many families that don’t travel. How do we show kids what’s outside of El Paso?’
“We made a very purposeful decision. Rather than choosing one part of our community over the other, we asked the designers to marry those ideas.”
“Within La Nube, we have Desert Bloom, which is a nod to our beautiful Chihuahua Desert, but then we also have another zone, Fly High, where you can go in a rocket ship and travel to another planet. There is a constant back-and-forth between celebrating our region and allowing kids to think outside of El Paso.”
La Nube aims to inspire children to become excited about different areas of science and connect that excitement to careers.
“Typically, as younger people, we tend to be defined by the people around us, our parents, or maybe aunts and uncles, in terms of the careers that are out there,” she observes.
“For example, we have a wonderful exhibit called Follow your Instincts, which is all about animals. If you love animals, you can learn about careers dealing with animals. Within Follow your Instincts, we have a care lab where the kiddos can ‘become’ veterinarians.”
“If the kid puts the stuffed animal in the X-ray machine, the X-ray image will be of that animal. If the stuffed toy is a fox, it’ll be the X-ray of a real fox. It’s not all make-believe; it connects to real life.”
The different zones at La Nube
She outlines the discovery centre’s nine zones:
“The ‘Sky’ zone covers weather, renewable energies, and sustainable living. Then we have the ‘Anything’s Possible’ Climber, a 50-foot, four-storey climber all about geometry. Our inspiration for it was the City Museum in St. Louis.”
‘Desert Bloom’ is the only age-restricted zone, designed specifically for the birth to three-year-old age range and featuring a Chihuahua Desert theme.
“‘Follow Your Instincts’, as I said, is all about animals. It’s very role-play based and is aimed at the four to 8-year-old range where the kiddos are either going to become the animals and learn about habitats, movements and sounds and what the animals eat, or become the veterinarians caring for them. Then we have ‘Fly High’, a nod to the aerospace industry, which is all around us.”
El Paso is the hub of a thriving air and space industry, which includes one of the four SpaceX facilities.
“In addition to the cornerstone rocket ship ‘wow’ exhibit and a ton of other experiences, Fly High features the most high-tech paper airplane testing facility you could possibly want,” she comments/ “It even collects the data: How fast did the airplane go? How far did it get? What was the launch angle? We have fans to create turbulence and up-and-down drafts. It’s super cool.”
The next zone, ‘Making Waves,’ is all about sound, sound waves, and music. Designed as a series of pods, it allows children to explore instruments, echoes, and objects that make sounds.
“Then ‘Challenge It’ is a sort of maker space on steroids. It’s rooted in the idea that kids don’t embrace ambiguity. As a writer, nothing is worse than a blank sheet of paper. What’s step one when you’re trying to solve a scientific enquiry?”
Essentially an engineering experience, Challenge It is focused on trying, failing, and trying again.
“This space has cool open-ended platforms, robotics, and coding. It has 3D printers and laser cutters. Kids will be able to design cars and boats. We will have a water table on which they can race those boats. It’s about embracing challenges outside the set rubrics they have in school that tell them, ‘This is how you get an A’. That’s not how real life works.”
The next zone is ‘Flow’:
“This is all about water. When we were doing the public meetings, this concern was raised: we live in the desert. Water is a precious commodity; we promote conservation in our region. There was a concern from the community about how much water might be wasted to do this – but we also know that kids love to play water.”
The solution is typically innovative: La Nube is the first children’s museum and science centre to possess its own built-in water recycling plant.
“Other cities come to El Paso to learn how we do the desalinisation process; we’re kind of famous for this.”
El Paso is home to the world’s largest inland desalination plant, making the region’s vast brackish groundwater resources usable:
“So we have made a mini desalinisation plant, right down to the colour of the pipes, using the same process, showing the same messages. The kids can see the process through big windows with signage and understand how it’s happening – and we can show the community in full transparency that we’re recycling the water.”
“If we’re going to be good conservators of water, we have to understand how we can waste water, so we took the science behind how we engage with water in our everyday lives and blew it up.
“There is literally a giant toilet bowl with a U-bend. There’s a massive siphon that shows the way water goes down the drain. And there’s a big shower you can get under: it protects you from getting soaked, but it’ll show you how much water per minute is used: when you’re telling teenage kids not to take a 20-minute shower, what does that mean? They can go into a dishwasher. We wanted kids to explore how they engage with water daily.”
“This is our secret exhibit; we haven’t unveiled it,” she says. “I mentioned previously that our sister city, Ciudad Juarez, is right across the border. We are connected. They have a hybrid children’s museum science centre, La Rodadora.”
Children’s museums sometimes have a ‘portal’ where young visitors can wave and say hello to a child in a museum in another country.
“We wanted this to be on a much more collaborative scale,” Otero says. “So there is a mirrored experience in both La Nube and La Rodadora. The teaser I will give you is that when guests in La Nube do something, it will have an immediate effect in La Rodadora, and vice versa, and when the kids learn to collaborate, they will make other things happen.”
A local technology company, Flō Networks, put in dedicated fibre lines between La Nube and La Rodadora:
“This means we can have real-time immediate effects as if we were in the same room with each other,” she explains.
Upon arriving at La Nube, each visitor will receive an RFID wristband to store data and photos from multiple zones. This means the visitor’s unique journey can be saved and revisited at home later, providing engagement for further visits.
“As you navigate La Nube, there will be opportunities to make videos or design things,” she says. “You can tap the wristband and save them. When you come down the slide in the climber, you’ll get a photo taken, which will be saved to the wristband. To add the science and math component, it’ll show how fast you were going both in miles per hour and kilometres. At the end of the day, you’ll get an email that says, ‘Thanks for visiting La Nube: here are your digital experiences!'”
In addition to uniquely innovative and interactive content, La Nube is characterised by two elements that make it outstanding.
“There are two things we’re particularly proud of. Firstly, we are one of the only non-hierarchal bilingual museums. When you visit museums around the United States, English is typically at the top, with the other language or languages below it, often in a smaller, thinner font. That sends a message of importance.”
“We live in a fully bilingual community; when you come in, the signage is bilingual, too: sometimes Spanish is on top; sometimes it’s on the bottom; sometimes left, sometimes right. It is the scientific terms in both languages that are in bold.”
Beyond this, she adds:
“We were very careful to have a translation team that did cultural, rather than literal, translations, being mindful of border Spanish; being mindful of how people actually communicate, so the meaning has quality.”
Inclusivity is at the core of La Nube
The second element that sets La Nube apart is its commitment to inclusivity.
“We strive to be a beacon of inclusion and access, thinking about ways our guests with different abilities can navigate la Nube in comfort.”
The ‘Anything’s Possible’ Climber, a geometric structure comprised of cylinders, dodecahedrons, and spheres, is an example:
“Everybody wants to get to the top. If you’re in a wheelchair, that’s difficult, so we have a wheelchair track that goes through the tippy-top of the climber so that the kids in wheelchairs can feel like they’re in the clouds.”
There are also wheelchairs for the non-disabled children to sit in to navigate the track so they can gain empathy and insight into the perspective of a wheelchair user.
“In the ‘Making Waves’ zone, which is all about sound and music, we have a bass bed,” she adds. “Children with hearing loss or can’t hear can lie down and feel the sound waves through their bodies.”
For neurodivergent visitors, cocoons outside the Making Waves zone offer sensory respite for those who need a break from the noise and bustle to regroup, while sensory backpacks can be checked out.
“These contain noise-cancelling headphones, sunglasses that dim the light, a weighted vest and a necklace kids can chew on and keep,” Otero explains. “It means they have tools enabling them to navigate the loudness of the museum.”
“One of the challenges that we’re still working on is for kiddos who are either blind or have low vision,” she continues.
“At the core of La Nube’s educational philosophy is the fact that we’re not going to tell guests how to experience La Nube. There isn’t one place to start and one place to finish. There isn’t one way to engage with each of the exhibit experiences. We want this to be about choice in their learning – but that makes it hard for those who can’t see because they depend on a path.”
To find a solution, the team have decided to set up an empathy design competition:
“I’m excited about it,” she says. “We will do it with engineering students at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). We will give them real-world problems and ask them to devise solutions.
“Our philosophy is to allow children to choose their own experiences rather than create paths that force them on a pre-mapped experience. How do we preserve that same philosophy for kids who can’t see?
“We’re interested to see whether someone can come up with something – an app, or maybe a topographical map – an assist that will allow these children to experience La Nube with the same choice philosophy as sighted children.”
People with experience of sight loss will be among the jurors on the panel judging the empathy competition. During the design process, Otero’s team met with two El Paso nonprofits serving blind and partially-sighted people and also spoke with an architect who had lost his sight:
“He was very honest,” she comments. “He talked about how, prior to losing his sight, he was insensitive; he was all about his design and how it looked rather than functionality. And then he lost his sight, and it changed his whole perspective. I got an opportunity to sit with him and understand that perspective. It was really out of those conversations that we realised we had not created a way to support guests who have low vision or are blind in the way that we would want to.”
For La Nube, inclusivity means every day. Otero expands on this:
“We didn’t want to be one of the museums where, if you belong to a certain group, you can come the first Tuesday of every month. That’s not inclusive. We are working to make La Nube inclusive for all these different groups every day.”
This does not mean, she stresses, that it will necessarily be perfect from day one:
“Just as we hope guests will embrace iteration and refinement because that’s how scientific innovation happens, our staff will do the same with this idealistic goal that La Nube will be seen as a beacon of inclusion and access.”
“We are incredibly proud, as a community, to bring La Nube to life,” Otero says.
Konular: Environment-ESG