Thinking with our hands
Structural literacy, spatial reasoning, and what building and play can bring to education.
WORK / CREATIONS / COLLABORATIONS
Ideas that became things.
Not all thinking remains on paper. Some becomes a room, a model, a classroom demonstration, a hinged square, a new way to teach.
SERVICES / PUBLIC SPEAKING
Invite Michael to speak.
Art, invention, and the ways we learn to see.
Michael Acerra is a public speaker, artist, inventor, and educator. His talks connect the practice of making with questions about creativity, learning, nature, and meaning.
For conferences, schools, universities, and organizations looking for a conversation across disciplines, Michael brings the perspective of a working artist and the inventor of Lux Blox.
Topics to explore together
From the studio to Lux Blox
How drawing, observing nature, and asking unusual questions can become the starting points for invention.
Patterns across disciplines
Geometry, natural form, and the connections between art, mathematics, and the search for meaning.
Tell Michael about your event.
Include your organization, audience, preferred date, location or online format, and the themes you would like to explore.
mike@luxblox.com ↗INVENTION / WITH HEATHER ACERRA
Lux Blox
A flexible, hinged building system built from a small vocabulary of parts. It opens experiments in motion, geometry, architecture, molecules and machines.
Co-founded by Michael and Heather Acerra in 2015; winner of the 2019 FedEx Small Business Grant grand prize.
EDUCATION / WORK IN DEVELOPMENT
Structure Smart
A physical and digital approach to structural literacy: noticing form, anticipating its behavior, testing predictions and giving names to insights after understanding.
The working classroom cycle is Build → Break → Ask → Fix → Name. This is a developing educational framework, not a claim that its outcomes have already been established by large-scale independent studies.
AN EARLIER CHAPTER
Acerra Studios
Years of classical fine-art practice, portraiture, murals and instruction led naturally into experimentation with how people perceive and construct form. The studio years are not a preface to the inventions; they are one of their foundations.
Visit the studio archive ↗
PEOPLE WHO MADE CONNECTIONS POSSIBLE
Collaboration across fields.
Research and projects involve teachers, mathematics-and-art collaborators, university faculty and engineers. Attribution belongs alongside the work.
Bridges 2019
With Matias Kaukolinna, Alexey Ivchenko and Kristóf Fenyvesi, exploring kaleidocycles through dynamic construction.
PublicationUniversity of Jyväskylä
Participation in an international UNESCO Chairs conference on education, creativity and resilience.
Conference reportBradley University
An early public profile of the founders’ creative path and their educational enterprise.
Founders’ profile