I love museums. Art museums, history museums, museums dedicated to illusions or Communism or ceramics or seafaring – I’ve spent happy afternoons in all of these and many more besides. But there is one exception, and although it feels like sacrilege to write it, that exception is science museums. Apart from a couple of work trips and a visit to Berlin’s Deutsches Technikmuseum (which, with its halls full of steam trains and printing presses, is more about the history of technology than science per se), I have not voluntarily set foot inside a science museum for at least 10 years.
It’s not that I don’t like science. I do. It also isn’t that science-related things feel too much like work; if they did, I wouldn’t visit science labs on holiday. And it certainly isn’t that I already know everything about the exhibits. In fact, my lack of enthusiasm for science museums was a complete mystery to me until I read Michael John Gorman’s book Idea Colliders: the Future of Science Museums. In the opening chapter, Gorman, who is the founding director of Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin and BIOTOPIA Naturkundesmuseum Bayern, makes a crucial observation. Most science museums, he notes, “limit our engagement with science to a form of ritualized play”.
While theme-park-like science centres full of interactive exhibits are, Gorman writes, “generally quite successful in stimulating the curiosity and interest of children”, the downside is that “the playful brand of hands-on science they purveyed sometimes struggled to engage older teenagers and adults to the same degree”. Simply put, if you’re over 14, you probably aren’t the target audience for your local science museum, so you shouldn’t feel surprised (or in my case guilty) if it’s not your cup of tea.
At this point, I can imagine a certain type of physicist reader – one who is dismayed by science illiteracy among the general public; believes that “dumbing down” in museums, schools and TV documentaries is largely to blame for it; and probably never cared much for hands-on exhibits in the first place – nodding in agreement. Gorman, however, is not advocating a return to the text-heavy exhibits of 50 years ago. He also holds little truck with the instructional approach that some physicists might prefer. While setting up Science Gallery, Gorman declined a Trinity College physicist’s request that a panel of distinguished scientists should vet all material for accuracy, and gave short shrift to the same unnamed physicist’s demand that event planners should focus on the questions “What significant scientific information is this event intended to convey?” and “How does it serve to promote science?”
Rather than presenting visitors with a set of promotional scientific facts, Gorman decided that Science Gallery should do three things. First, it should connect people from different communities. Second, it should foster participation in ways that go beyond mere interactivity to involve members of the public in actual science. Finally, it should generate surprise by capturing the imaginations of visitors and media organizations alike.
To this end, Gorman set up an advisory board made up of a rotating cast of “creative individuals” drawn from art, design, technology and media as well as science. The ideas they generated included an exhibit called Selfmade, in which a biologist and an artist teamed up to create cheese using bacteria samples from public figures. While Selfmade lasted, visitors to Science Gallery’s Community BioLab could sniff (though not taste) the various human cheeses on display and contribute to the project by making their own. Naturally, the project kicked off with a wine and human cheese evening, complete with a sign proclaiming “Don’t worry, the wine is normal.”
Another exhibit, I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin, was based on a tongue-in-cheek proposal (made by a Japanese designer, Ai Hasegawa) that an environmentally conscious woman might wish to give birth to an endangered species rather than increase the human population. This provocative idea served as an entry point for visitors to explore the ethical, psychological and biological barriers to interspecies gestation, and come to their own conclusions about whether such an act would be possible or desirable.
To help visitors interpret these non-traditional exhibits, Science Gallery recruited mediators – generally university students in science, engineering or humanities – to engage members of the public in conversations inspired by the artworks or other objects on show. Gorman is full of praise for these mediators, but his remarks on the “many positive and sometimes amusing comments” they received in the museum’s visitors’ book – including “the mediators are hot!” – may raise a few eyebrows. In the age of #MeToo, is it really still amusing for young people to get leched over in their workplace?
Barriers sometimes arise not from superficial things like monolingual signage, but from a museum’s content
Apart from this solitary sour note, Gorman’s ideas about how to make science museums more welcoming are a major strength of the book. In one thought-provoking passage, he notes that barriers sometimes arise not from superficial things like monolingual signage, but from a museum’s content – either because it doesn’t speak to the concerns of minoritized groups, or because it conveys “a colonialist and exclusionary narrative”. While many museums try to promote inclusion through visits by disadvantaged schools, Gorman notes that these otherwise laudable efforts can backfire if students feel they were “dragged to the museum” by their teachers and never engage with the content on their own.
Toward the end of Idea Colliders, Gorman explores the subject of “fake news” and conspiracist thinking. Some defenders of science have suggested that to combat misinformation, scientists (and by extension science museums) should gloss over internal debates in public, and instead adopt a “united front” strategy that treats science as a set of indisputable facts.
Gorman, unsurprisingly, thinks this approach will fail. Trust needs to be earned, and insights from social science suggest that individuals are trusted when they are viewed not only as competent and reliable (scientists generally do well at this), but also as empathetic and having integrity (in the sense of shared intentions and words that align with deeds). To build that kind of trust, Gorman thinks that science museums should embrace uncertainty (where it exists) and demonstrate empathy by engaging visitors on subjects that matter to them. It’s a laudable goal, and if I ever get a (post-pandemic) free afternoon in Dublin or Munich, I might just break my science-museum duck and find out if he’s achieved it.
- 2020 MIT Press $25.00 176pp