Name: Innovative Lives: Shawn Springs
Start: 2024-03-27T16:00:00-04:00
End: 2024-03-27T17:15:00-04:00
Location: Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Innovative Lives: Shawn Springs

The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center engages, educates, and empowers the public to participate in technological, economic, and social change. Drawing on and contributing to the Smithsonian Institution’s world-leading collections of artifacts and archives, the Lemelson Center’s scholarship and programming advance the historical study of invention and innovation, encourage children and adults to apply their curiosity to real-world problems, and showcase the diversity of inventors who have shaped world history.

Smithsonian's Lemelson Center

Meet Shawn Springs, CEO and Founder of Windpact, former NFL player

Smithsonian National Museum of American History

The Lemelson Center and InventEd will present a conversation with Shawn Springs, former NFL player and the CEO and Founder of Windpact, a Software and Technology company. After surviving a serious car crash, Springs was inspired to found Windpact, convinced that car safety technologies could protect athletes. Working to improve the technology for helmets, Windpact invented Crash Cloud technology to protect the brain by absorbing collision energy. The technology is now used in sports, the military, construction, and automotive industries. About Change Your Game/Cambia Tu JuegoOpening March 15, 2024Invention and technology can make the difference between victory and defeat as well as expand the field of who can participate in sports. “Change Your Game,” is a family-friendly, interactive exhibition on the intersection of invention, sports and technology developed by the museum’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. The exhibit will showcase dynamic stories and objects related to diverse inventors, athletes, and technologies that have changed how sports are played. A prototype of the Jogbra from the 1970 reflects the fitness boom at a time when women had few athletic clothing options, a football helmet with Crash Cloud prototype to help protect the brain, a Hawk-Eye camera used during the pandemic by the U.S. Open to automate line calls and prostheses that made extreme sports possible for athletes with amputations are among the objects in the exhibition. Visitors will be invited to identify themselves as inventive problem solvers who can become "game changers" in their daily lives. In addition to hands-on activities in the gallery’s four key sections, the adjacent Draper Spark!Lab will also feature themed activities. About the Innovative Lives Program Series:Since 1995, Innovative Lives has been the Lemelson Center’s flagship public program series. For more than 25 years, we have welcomed a diverse array of more than 85 inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs to participate in informal chats with host-interviewers, students, and members of the general public. Featured speakers share the stories behind their work, including key inspirations, their personal invention processes, failures encountered, and pathways to success, all while framing a discussion around how the public can participate in technology change. Through this series of contemporary inventor talks, we hope to inspire and encourage individuals to pursue their own ideas and to foster a greater appreciation for the role of invention and innovation in shaping our world.

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Innovative Lives: Shawn Springs

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