Tomorrow’s world
As two major science galleries are about to be unveiled, Geraldine Kendall looks at how museums are encouraging the public to engage with the subject
Sex is always a good place to start if you want to open a new gallery with a bang (no pun intended).
That’s what the Wellcome Collection in London will be counting on next month when it unveils Gallery Two, its new space for temporary exhibitions – the first of which, the Institute of Sexology (20 November-20 September 2015), will be an exploration of how human sexuality has been observed and analysed by medical practitioners since the 19th century, complete with early contraceptives, anatomical artwork and scarily sharp anti-masturbation devices.
Gallery Two is just one aspect of a £17.5m redevelopment project at the Wellcome Collection. Other new elements include a youth studio, a hub for long-term scientific research and a renovation of the building’s iconic Reading Room, home to its extensive archive of medical history, which will reopen in February 2015.
All of these spaces will be closely interconnected, with the research arm influencing what goes on in the public galleries, and vice versa.
The Wellcome Collection is not the only scientific institution with a big project to unveil. Later this month, the Science Museum will open Information Age, the first permanent gallery in the UK dedicated to the history of communications and information technology.
This will be followed by a new research centre and further galleries on mathematics and medicine, all part of the Science Museum’s 15-year masterplan to transform the way it engages the public.
There’s no doubt that the public appetite for science is growing. The online revolution has done much to give science a sense of relevance and immediacy in everyday life – on social media, people can watch astronauts live at work in zero gravity, access raw information on scientific studies for themselves and, significantly, contribute their own thoughts and experiences to what was once a closed forum of experts.
These developments reflect a growing feeling among the science community that, firstly, science should not be presented as just an isolated, elevated body of knowledge but as an integral part of culture and society, closely linked to other humanities; and secondly, that a two-way, discursive approach to communicating science is far better than the traditional linear model, in which experts communicate knowledge to the public in a strictly top-down manner.
“A better and more sophisticated form of science communication views science as a socially, culturally and politically embedded body of knowledge,” says Rachel Souhami, a lecturer in science communication and museum studies at Imperial College London.
Science engagement
In the past 15 years, science educators, including museums, have acknowledged this, moving away from old-fashioned “communication” and towards the more inclusive, collaborative model of “science engagement” and co-curation.
Souhami says this approach is still far from universal, however. “There is still a tendency to slip into a ‘cognitive deficit’ mode of communication, which treats people as empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge.”
But times are changing. “Science in museums is at a really interesting juncture,” says Ken Arnold, the head of public programmes at the Wellcome Collection. “It is moving in a direction that is much more interdisciplinary, much more cultural. People are realising that it does not need to diminish science to call it cultural.
“We see ourselves as first and foremost a cultural venue,” Arnold says. “We are very much science focused but the breadth of our research covers all the humanities.”
Arnold says there is a growing awareness that the public has more to contribute to the scientific discourse than was previously assumed.
“There’s a more democratic sense of where knowledge comes from,” he says. “It’s not only the experts’ expertise that counts. There’s a big philosophical question at the core of that idea: what constitutes knowledge?
"We’re not trying to challenge the university model but there is another form of knowledge, a more ephemeral knowledge, wanting to find things out for the sake of it. We’d like to make people feel that they don’t have to spend 10 years on a PhD to contribute.”
When the Wellcome Collection opened in 2007, one of its key philosophies was to engage the public in new and ongoing research rather than being seen as a place that just disseminates stuff that people already know. The museum will build on this approach in its new spaces, particularly with its new “investigative” model of public programming.
Starting with the Institute of Sexology, the museum is planning to run temporary exhibitions for a year at a time, with displays and interpretation changing in response to public input, talks and live events.
“What we’re trying to do is not quite know what the exhibition will look like at the end,” Arnold says. “We want to explore what would happen if you do something that’s a long temporary exhibition – what it would be like to change and develop the content throughout the year.
"We want to indulge in the sense that maybe you can learn what your subject is by being open and find out how visitors can contribute to an exhibition. Something happens when people come into public spaces that you can’t quite predict.”
Arnold cites Le Laboratoire in Paris as one institution that has pioneered exhibitions that “think out loud” and embed science firmly in culture.
Le Laboratoire is a contemporary art and design venue in which scientists and designers collaborate to create art installations based on cutting-edge science experiments. Each piece is displayed to the public as a work-in-progress so that visitors can witness the creative process rather than just the end result.
The work at Le Laboratoire looks like contemporary art but is grounded in scientific theory; recent innovations include Cellular Design, a prototype sculpture for transporting water more efficiently based on the model of a biological cell, and Clouds of Flavour, an experiment that created vaporised flavours in glass bowls with the aim of exploring how medicine might be delivered to the body through inhalation.
Dynamic and experimental practice like this comes more easily to independent institutions such as the Wellcome Collection and Le Laboratoire, but publicly funded institutions, many of which are struggling with significant budget cuts, are naturally more cautious.
Active approach
“Museums are conservative institutions,” Souhami says. “I don’t think there’s been many that really want to do risk-taking.”
This can also affect how museums explore more complex, challenging topics such as stem cell research or climate science.
“They get worried about not giving a balanced view,” Souhami says. “The problem is that contemporary science is something that changes rapidly and often seems unresolved. Do you give each view 50:50? Does it mean shying away from anything that might be controversial? At some point museums have just got to get off the fence.”
Another common criticism is that out of fear of being seen as overly technical and dull, science museums have started placing too much emphasis on interactives and digital content, losing sight of objects and their social context.
The Science Museum is aiming to redress this balance with Information Age, which will be the first redisplay of its permanent collection in 14 years and the single largest gallery within the museum.
“Objects are really at the heart of the gallery,” says the gallery’s curator Tilly Blyth, who is the keeper of technologies and engineering at the museum. “Our approach is to look at the objects as a way into exploring the scientific principle.”
The visually arresting, six-metre high Rugby tuning coil, once part of the most powerful telegraph transmitter in the world, is the gallery’s centrepiece exhibit.
“We’re keen to display some of the extra-ordinary infrastructure that sits behind the technology,” Blyth says. “We’ve put the tuning coil right at the heart because it has a lovely history and helps us delve into the science quite quickly.”
Although there will be plenty of information on how the technology operates, the interpretation focuses first and foremost on people and storytelling.
“We’re taking a narrative-led approach,” Blyth says. “People are quoted throughout the gallery. We hear Alexander Graham Bell talking about his marriage to Mabel Hubbard, who was deaf, and how that got him thinking about how to transmit speech in other ways.”
The exhibition will also emphasise how users of technology are not just passive consumers, but pioneers who have had a strong influence over its development.
“We’ll be looking at significant moments in the way people use technology from a user’s point of view rather than the innovator’s point of view, exploring how users shape technology and make it useful for their own purposes,” Blyth says.
The museum has worked closely with communities in the UK and overseas to identify personal stories on this subject. Community engagement is important because a key issue facing the sector at present is whether science institutions are doing enough to reach out to underrepresented audiences, and to get children and young people – especially girls – interested in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects.
Inspiration challenge
The UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres (ASDC) recently published a report outlining the work museums and science centres are doing to engage diverse audiences.
Case studies include a partnership between Glasgow Science Centre and Glasgow City Council to fund one visit a year for every schoolchild in the city. There was also a gender awareness project at Techniquest in Cardiff, which analysed its science interpretation through a “gender lens” in a bid to engage more girls in the subject.
But more diversity-focused work is vital, according to ASDC director Penny Fidler (see box below), who says science engagement is still badly underfunded compared with other sectors.
The growing political will to tackle the UK’s skills gap in Stem subjects, which have been prioritised in education through courses such as the English baccalaureate, may also give museums an opportunity to explore new streams of funding from the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills and the Department for Education.
Universities too are being increasingly encouraged to demonstrate the public impact of their scientific research, which could give rise to partnership opportunities between museums and researchers.
Ken Arnold at the Wellcome Collection says science engagement is a plural world, spanning academic research, history, culture, education and many other disciplines. The challenge for museums and science centres is to bring all those areas together in a way that continues to inspire visitors.
“It’s about trying to make the boundaries as porous as possible,” Arnold says.
This summer the Wellcome Collection in London opened a new youth studio to give teenagers an opportunity to creatively engage with science through a series of art workshops, talks and a range of other activities.
The studio is equipped with hi-tech digital technology and modelling and making equipment; its glass walls enable visitors to watch the young creators at work while also ensuring that the participants are not cut off from the wider museum.
Through workshops, seminars, brainstorming and media production, participants are able to explore the latest thinking and experimentation in issues such as neuroscience or infectious diseases, and work with the museum’s collection.
“We’re an avowedly adult venue aimed at ages 14 and above, but we’re very interested in engaging with the idea of co-producing projects with young people,” says Ken Arnold, the head of public programmes at the Wellcome Collection.
“It’s about making the studio both a process and a product. We’re making it part of our regular programme – the public will be able to see where it is and wander past.”
The exhibits created by the participants will be displayed on the main exhibition floor.
“As a nation and as a global society we have some major challenges ahead, especially in relation to climate and energy,” says Penny Fidler, the director of the UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres.
“We need our young people to see it as something they want to be part of, both for our future economy and our future wellbeing.
“We also want every UK citizen to feel sufficiently confident with science and the process of science to understand the evidence, ask the questions they need and discuss matters and policies that will have a big impact on their lives.
“The nation’s major science engagement organisations are collectively working to address this, including science and discovery centres, national museums, environment centres and learned societies.
“Together, these organisations encourage over 20 million children and adults every year (385,000 every week) to explore science in a hands-on, intriguing and personal way.
Over 10 million of those who choose to participate every year are women and girls. Teachers bring over 2 million school students from all backgrounds to support and widen the range of science that can be delivered in schools. Many students take part in science practicals, workshops, discussions and science events.”
That’s what the Wellcome Collection in London will be counting on next month when it unveils Gallery Two, its new space for temporary exhibitions – the first of which, the Institute of Sexology (20 November-20 September 2015), will be an exploration of how human sexuality has been observed and analysed by medical practitioners since the 19th century, complete with early contraceptives, anatomical artwork and scarily sharp anti-masturbation devices.
Gallery Two is just one aspect of a £17.5m redevelopment project at the Wellcome Collection. Other new elements include a youth studio, a hub for long-term scientific research and a renovation of the building’s iconic Reading Room, home to its extensive archive of medical history, which will reopen in February 2015.
All of these spaces will be closely interconnected, with the research arm influencing what goes on in the public galleries, and vice versa.
The Wellcome Collection is not the only scientific institution with a big project to unveil. Later this month, the Science Museum will open Information Age, the first permanent gallery in the UK dedicated to the history of communications and information technology.
This will be followed by a new research centre and further galleries on mathematics and medicine, all part of the Science Museum’s 15-year masterplan to transform the way it engages the public.
There’s no doubt that the public appetite for science is growing. The online revolution has done much to give science a sense of relevance and immediacy in everyday life – on social media, people can watch astronauts live at work in zero gravity, access raw information on scientific studies for themselves and, significantly, contribute their own thoughts and experiences to what was once a closed forum of experts.
These developments reflect a growing feeling among the science community that, firstly, science should not be presented as just an isolated, elevated body of knowledge but as an integral part of culture and society, closely linked to other humanities; and secondly, that a two-way, discursive approach to communicating science is far better than the traditional linear model, in which experts communicate knowledge to the public in a strictly top-down manner.
“A better and more sophisticated form of science communication views science as a socially, culturally and politically embedded body of knowledge,” says Rachel Souhami, a lecturer in science communication and museum studies at Imperial College London.
Science engagement
In the past 15 years, science educators, including museums, have acknowledged this, moving away from old-fashioned “communication” and towards the more inclusive, collaborative model of “science engagement” and co-curation.
Souhami says this approach is still far from universal, however. “There is still a tendency to slip into a ‘cognitive deficit’ mode of communication, which treats people as empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge.”
But times are changing. “Science in museums is at a really interesting juncture,” says Ken Arnold, the head of public programmes at the Wellcome Collection. “It is moving in a direction that is much more interdisciplinary, much more cultural. People are realising that it does not need to diminish science to call it cultural.
“We see ourselves as first and foremost a cultural venue,” Arnold says. “We are very much science focused but the breadth of our research covers all the humanities.”
Arnold says there is a growing awareness that the public has more to contribute to the scientific discourse than was previously assumed.
“There’s a more democratic sense of where knowledge comes from,” he says. “It’s not only the experts’ expertise that counts. There’s a big philosophical question at the core of that idea: what constitutes knowledge?
"We’re not trying to challenge the university model but there is another form of knowledge, a more ephemeral knowledge, wanting to find things out for the sake of it. We’d like to make people feel that they don’t have to spend 10 years on a PhD to contribute.”
When the Wellcome Collection opened in 2007, one of its key philosophies was to engage the public in new and ongoing research rather than being seen as a place that just disseminates stuff that people already know. The museum will build on this approach in its new spaces, particularly with its new “investigative” model of public programming.
Starting with the Institute of Sexology, the museum is planning to run temporary exhibitions for a year at a time, with displays and interpretation changing in response to public input, talks and live events.
“What we’re trying to do is not quite know what the exhibition will look like at the end,” Arnold says. “We want to explore what would happen if you do something that’s a long temporary exhibition – what it would be like to change and develop the content throughout the year.
"We want to indulge in the sense that maybe you can learn what your subject is by being open and find out how visitors can contribute to an exhibition. Something happens when people come into public spaces that you can’t quite predict.”
Arnold cites Le Laboratoire in Paris as one institution that has pioneered exhibitions that “think out loud” and embed science firmly in culture.
Le Laboratoire is a contemporary art and design venue in which scientists and designers collaborate to create art installations based on cutting-edge science experiments. Each piece is displayed to the public as a work-in-progress so that visitors can witness the creative process rather than just the end result.
The work at Le Laboratoire looks like contemporary art but is grounded in scientific theory; recent innovations include Cellular Design, a prototype sculpture for transporting water more efficiently based on the model of a biological cell, and Clouds of Flavour, an experiment that created vaporised flavours in glass bowls with the aim of exploring how medicine might be delivered to the body through inhalation.
Dynamic and experimental practice like this comes more easily to independent institutions such as the Wellcome Collection and Le Laboratoire, but publicly funded institutions, many of which are struggling with significant budget cuts, are naturally more cautious.
Active approach
“Museums are conservative institutions,” Souhami says. “I don’t think there’s been many that really want to do risk-taking.”
This can also affect how museums explore more complex, challenging topics such as stem cell research or climate science.
“They get worried about not giving a balanced view,” Souhami says. “The problem is that contemporary science is something that changes rapidly and often seems unresolved. Do you give each view 50:50? Does it mean shying away from anything that might be controversial? At some point museums have just got to get off the fence.”
Another common criticism is that out of fear of being seen as overly technical and dull, science museums have started placing too much emphasis on interactives and digital content, losing sight of objects and their social context.
The Science Museum is aiming to redress this balance with Information Age, which will be the first redisplay of its permanent collection in 14 years and the single largest gallery within the museum.
“Objects are really at the heart of the gallery,” says the gallery’s curator Tilly Blyth, who is the keeper of technologies and engineering at the museum. “Our approach is to look at the objects as a way into exploring the scientific principle.”
The visually arresting, six-metre high Rugby tuning coil, once part of the most powerful telegraph transmitter in the world, is the gallery’s centrepiece exhibit.
“We’re keen to display some of the extra-ordinary infrastructure that sits behind the technology,” Blyth says. “We’ve put the tuning coil right at the heart because it has a lovely history and helps us delve into the science quite quickly.”
Although there will be plenty of information on how the technology operates, the interpretation focuses first and foremost on people and storytelling.
“We’re taking a narrative-led approach,” Blyth says. “People are quoted throughout the gallery. We hear Alexander Graham Bell talking about his marriage to Mabel Hubbard, who was deaf, and how that got him thinking about how to transmit speech in other ways.”
The exhibition will also emphasise how users of technology are not just passive consumers, but pioneers who have had a strong influence over its development.
“We’ll be looking at significant moments in the way people use technology from a user’s point of view rather than the innovator’s point of view, exploring how users shape technology and make it useful for their own purposes,” Blyth says.
The museum has worked closely with communities in the UK and overseas to identify personal stories on this subject. Community engagement is important because a key issue facing the sector at present is whether science institutions are doing enough to reach out to underrepresented audiences, and to get children and young people – especially girls – interested in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects.
Inspiration challenge
The UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres (ASDC) recently published a report outlining the work museums and science centres are doing to engage diverse audiences.
Case studies include a partnership between Glasgow Science Centre and Glasgow City Council to fund one visit a year for every schoolchild in the city. There was also a gender awareness project at Techniquest in Cardiff, which analysed its science interpretation through a “gender lens” in a bid to engage more girls in the subject.
But more diversity-focused work is vital, according to ASDC director Penny Fidler (see box below), who says science engagement is still badly underfunded compared with other sectors.
The growing political will to tackle the UK’s skills gap in Stem subjects, which have been prioritised in education through courses such as the English baccalaureate, may also give museums an opportunity to explore new streams of funding from the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills and the Department for Education.
Universities too are being increasingly encouraged to demonstrate the public impact of their scientific research, which could give rise to partnership opportunities between museums and researchers.
Ken Arnold at the Wellcome Collection says science engagement is a plural world, spanning academic research, history, culture, education and many other disciplines. The challenge for museums and science centres is to bring all those areas together in a way that continues to inspire visitors.
“It’s about trying to make the boundaries as porous as possible,” Arnold says.
Inside the Wellcome Collection’s youth studio
This summer the Wellcome Collection in London opened a new youth studio to give teenagers an opportunity to creatively engage with science through a series of art workshops, talks and a range of other activities.
The studio is equipped with hi-tech digital technology and modelling and making equipment; its glass walls enable visitors to watch the young creators at work while also ensuring that the participants are not cut off from the wider museum.
Through workshops, seminars, brainstorming and media production, participants are able to explore the latest thinking and experimentation in issues such as neuroscience or infectious diseases, and work with the museum’s collection.
“We’re an avowedly adult venue aimed at ages 14 and above, but we’re very interested in engaging with the idea of co-producing projects with young people,” says Ken Arnold, the head of public programmes at the Wellcome Collection.
“It’s about making the studio both a process and a product. We’re making it part of our regular programme – the public will be able to see where it is and wander past.”
The exhibits created by the participants will be displayed on the main exhibition floor.
‘We want everyone to feel confident with science’
“As a nation and as a global society we have some major challenges ahead, especially in relation to climate and energy,” says Penny Fidler, the director of the UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres.
“We need our young people to see it as something they want to be part of, both for our future economy and our future wellbeing.
“We also want every UK citizen to feel sufficiently confident with science and the process of science to understand the evidence, ask the questions they need and discuss matters and policies that will have a big impact on their lives.
“The nation’s major science engagement organisations are collectively working to address this, including science and discovery centres, national museums, environment centres and learned societies.
“Together, these organisations encourage over 20 million children and adults every year (385,000 every week) to explore science in a hands-on, intriguing and personal way.
Over 10 million of those who choose to participate every year are women and girls. Teachers bring over 2 million school students from all backgrounds to support and widen the range of science that can be delivered in schools. Many students take part in science practicals, workshops, discussions and science events.”