Designed for brain-grabbing glitz, The Tech Museum of Innovation's new facility in San Jose, Calif., is the first of America's next generation of museums-conceived from the ground up in this age of real-time multi-media interactivity.

The Tech's brashly colored structure, resembling a giant orange-and-blue juice press, brings to mind a pavilion at a World's Fair of yesteryear. Inside, its highly entertaining exhibits-most of them corporate-sponsored, World's-Fair-style-inform about the latest developments in health care, automation, telecommunications and of course computers. Aimed at visitors from about the sixth grade and up, the museum is a mutable fair of up-to-the-minute technology bursting out of Silicon Valley, at whose foot San Jose beckons.The Tech's vice president for exhibits, Emily Routman,welcomes comparison of the 132,000-square-foot, threelevel structure to a mini-World's Fair. Like such venues, she says,The Tech focuses "not just on technology per se, but on the impact of technology on people, and of people on technology."