PBS's 'Design Squad' aims to engineer interest from tweens
It won't quite be ``Project Runway," but on PBS this winter, a group of teenagers will labor under unforgiving deadlines to design outfits with hidden functions -- in one case, a wedding dress that doubles as a tent. Handheld cameras will record their moves. Conflicts will ensue. Deep thoughts will be revealed.
If this won't get tweens excited about engineering, who knows what will?
That's the idea -- and the hope -- behind ``Design Squad," a new PBS show for 9- to 12-year-olds , filmed in Boston last summer and scheduled to premiere in February. It's the latest live-action kids' offering from WGBH, Boston's prolific producer of public television shows.
And it's a proposed solution to a vexing problem for public television. Yes, PBS still has repute as a go-to place for toddlers and younger kids. But how do you corral a tween audience hooked on ``Cheetah Girls" and ``High School Musical," and convince them that ``educational" can be cool?
The answer, producers hope, is to borrow looks and themes from elsewhere on the dial. WGBH has gotten results in the past from ``taking a commercial format that we know kids love and turning it inside out," says Brigid Sullivan, the station's vice president of children's programming.
That was the idea behind ``Fetch," WGBH's live action-cartoon hybrid, which premiered on PBS in May and got so popular so fast that it will be featured on a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. ``Fetch" comes from the production team behind ``Zoom," and has a science-based curriculum. It's also a postmodern fantasy, starring a cartoon dog who hosts a reality show for tween contestants. Its director, a veteran of ``Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," helped to infuse the show with a manic mood.
``Design Squad," another ``Zoom" spinoff, is aimed at a slightly older crowd, and it isn't quite so high-concept. The contestants are eight TV-friendly high school students with serious engineering aptitude. (Auditions involved constructing a chair that would hold the kids' own weight -- made entirely of newspaper and masking tape.) They'll be divided into teams of four, which will change with each episode, and rack up individual points. The winner will get a $10,000 scholarship from the
And no cartoon hosts here; instead, contestants are guided by a pair of 20- somethings who look as if they could be helming MTV's ``TRL," but happen to have engineering backgrounds. Deanne Bell , 27, had left an aerospace engineering job to travel the world when she spotted a call for auditions online. Nathan Ball , 23, an MIT graduate student, helped to design some of the show's challenges before he was tapped for an on-air job.
Ball also does beatboxing on the side, which will come in handy on a particular challenge, when contestants are asked to choreograph a light show for a hip-hop act. The rest of the challenges are similarly telegenic; contestants build a machine that makes pancakes, and design a ``summer sled," to go on grass, for L.L. Bean.
As the show was conceived and filmed, executive producer Marisa Wolsky says, she thought about ``Project Runway." She wanted something fast-paced and competitive, with an emphasis on process. She wanted to appeal to girls.
And she wanted to highlight engineering's real-world applications -- to liberate the field from its pocket-protector image, and inspire young viewers to practice the lost art of tinkering.
``It used to be that when you were growing up, you saw your father repairing his car in the driveway," Wolsky says. ``No one repairs anything anymore."
Indeed, if ``Runway" makes a convincing case that fashion is art, the ``Design Squad" producers want to prove that engineering can be artful, too. Choreographer Wyatt Jackson, another ``Zoom" veteran who judged the light-show challenge, says he's sold.
``A lot of my best friends are engineers," Jackson says. ``We talk about these kinds of things. Their world is not that different from my world."
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com 
