Today’s science, medicine and technology museums are facing a rapidly growing series of technological and social changes.
Ken Arnold and Thomas Söderqvist recently made a lucid appeal for such museums to adopt a Dogme-style “vow of chastity” (Museums Journal February 2011, p22).
In doing so, they raised a range of issues about how science and its history are displayed. But it is not clear that a “vow of chastity” is the right response for cultural institutions facing new and recognisably 21st-century challenges.
We live in a world where the British Museum recently appointed its first Wikipedian-in-residence, where the Oscar-winning film-maker Kevin MacDonald’s new movie, Life in a Day, is constructed entirely from footage donated via YouTube, and where news organisations such as the BBC and the Guardian are moving beyond merely padding out websites with user-generated content to reconfiguring how news is gathered, disseminated and consumed.
How might these new technological developments and the enthusiasm for participation allow museums of science and technology to broaden and deepen their engagement of audiences with history?
Conflicting attitudes towards science have an impact on the public’s relationship with museums of science and technology.
“People in this country think science is a bit nerdy and boring and something you do up to GSCEs and no further,” says Oliver Green, a research fellow at the London Transport Museum.
“So it becomes easy for museums of science to fall into the trap of thinking our main audience is kids, and what kids want is interactives, and what we need is to turn the place into an interactive centre for kids. There are so many missed opportunities.”
Jim Bennett, the director of the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, says that one of the problems is that visitors tend to believe that a science museum knows better and, as a result, they often think their role in a museum is passive: “They even apologise for not understanding, which is ridiculous,” he says.
“People don’t go into an Egyptian gallery and apologise for not reading hieroglyphics. Visitors actually bring an awful lot of understanding with them but they are not always allowed to realise it because science museums tend to slip into a teacherly role.”
One issue that science museums have had is reconciling the presentation of today’s “gee-whizz” cutting-edge developments with their role as custodians of historical collections.
“Scientists understand that science comes out of an immediate and direct engagement with the natural world,” says Bennett. “And although scientists know that they have a ‘history,’ they are uneasy about how that history, in all its totality and strangeness, could have led to where we are now.
“There’s quite a profound epistemological issue at stake in how science museums integrate the past into an explanation of what science is doing now.”
There’s broad agreement that museums of science and technology need to find compelling ways of linking together the presentation of science’s past with present developments and future debates, and that harnessing public enthusiasms might be one way to do this.
Recent audience research carried out by London’s Science Museum suggests that visitors are enthusiastic about finding out about the history of science even though they are appreciably unsure of what it is.
“It is high time we upped our game in telling the rich and intriguing stories of our historical collections and the contexts from which they come,” says Tim Boon, chief curator at the Science Museum.
“The key to this is what visitors already carry in their heads. History is a hugely popular leisure pursuit; the job of a science museum is to open up the relations between visitor interests in history in general and the history of science and technology in particular.”
Family historians, for example, might find a museum’s industrial and scientific objects help them better understand the lives of their ancestors.
Indeed, one of the encouraging findings of the Science Museum’s research was that visitors saw it as a good place to learn history and an enjoyable supplement to going to historical sites, watching documentaries and reading historical fiction.
“Rather than formulae or complicated technology, I’d like to see museums of science and technology make more use of personal connections,” argues Green.
“The Imperial War Museum, for example, is as much a museum of social history as a military museum. But there are no museums of science telling the social history of civilian technology as ambitiously as it does.”
The Science Museum hosted an international workshop on co-curation and public history last year and has begun a project exploring the use of external groups in the organisation of displays in museum development. But to date, co-curation has been limited, in particular in terms of working with collections.
Perhaps some of the most successful co-curation projects have involved artists working with anomalous, unusual or neglected collections. Manchester Art Gallery invited artists, researchers and school groups to rummage through the Mary Greg collection, an idiosyncratic range of everyday objects mainly from the pre-industrial age.
As their Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary blog attests, the experiment not only stimulated a broad spectrum of public activity but also demonstrated how the process of co-curation helped the gallery rethink the uses and importance of the collection.
The Museum of the History of Science in Oxford has already proved that such techniques can be successfully applied to museums of science and technology. Its Steampunk exhibition (13 October 2009-21 February 2010) became the museum’s most successful show.
It featured sculptures by 18 artists whose work relates to Steampunk, a sub-genre of science fiction that evokes an era where steam power is still widely used, usually Victorian Britain.
“People came out of the exhibition into a gallery of Victorian objects that had a steampunk-like sensibility,” says Bennett.
“What was interesting is that visitors took the sensibility of the art show with them into the gallery. They treated the objects with a kind of visual respect that they would not have done if they had just walked into a gallery of Victorian objects.”
The Steampunk exhibition was engaged with the visual aesthetic of Victorian science rather than the science itself, but Bennett is unrepentant.
“The benefit of co-curation was that it introduced us to a world that we had no idea that existed. It made us look at our collections in a new way. You have to be open-minded to recognise the value of that.”
Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum, has argued that co-curation can only work if a museum takes the contribution of participants seriously. The starting place needs to be: “In what ways could our museum benefit from the contributions of the public?”
Curators can be understandably resistant to the idea of ceding authority but, as Simon makes clear, successful co-curation demands the fuller input of curators rather than the abdication of responsibility.
No one else is as well placed to creatively manage the scope of the public’s input. But co-curation is a time-consuming process and one fraught with creative, organisational and logistical difficulties.
Museums of science and technology inhabit a world of maturing technologies and evolving audience expectations, which has consequences for how they narrate history. How to apply the lessons of this brave new world to the material strengths of a museum is a daunting task.
“We will grasp what we need to do when we understand better how people apply their existing experience when they encounter museum displays,” says Boon.
“Co-curation of many kinds is currently the best route to that enhanced understanding.”
Scott Anthony is a freelance journalist
There will be a session exploring science displays at the Museums Association conference (3-4 October, Brighton)
Click here for more information
Staff at the Science Museum have been using a range of co-curation techniques to learn more about how different people understand the history of science and technology.
The museum’s latest project is OraMix, which has been using theatre, music and sound to explore young adults’ responses to the Science Museum’s collection.
This has involved participants in the National Youth Theatre’s (NYT) Playing Up2 course, and students from City University’s BA in Creative Industries, visiting the museum over a two-month period. The aim was to attract more young adults, as this age group often stops visiting museums once they leave school.
The participants were asked to make the museum’s collection more attractive and relevant to their peers. As part of this, they talked to curators, scientists and other museum professionals. They also looked at attitudes to science and museums among their own age group.
“The young people that the participants spoke to often saw museums as quite rigid institutions and thought that museums were to do with school,” says Holly Jones, who developed the OraMix project with the Science Museum alongside Nicola Jennings, a colleague at Together Productions.
The participants found that young adults were interested in events at museums and wanted to get marketing information via online networks such as Facebook.
Activity at the museum centred on the Oramics machine, invented in the late 1960s by Daphne Oram, the electronic music composer who co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. The museum recently acquired the machine with the help of Goldsmiths College.
OraMix culminated in site-specific performances held at the museum in late March and early April.
Ken Arnold and Thomas Söderqvist recently made a lucid appeal for such museums to adopt a Dogme-style “vow of chastity” (Museums Journal February 2011, p22).
In doing so, they raised a range of issues about how science and its history are displayed. But it is not clear that a “vow of chastity” is the right response for cultural institutions facing new and recognisably 21st-century challenges.
We live in a world where the British Museum recently appointed its first Wikipedian-in-residence, where the Oscar-winning film-maker Kevin MacDonald’s new movie, Life in a Day, is constructed entirely from footage donated via YouTube, and where news organisations such as the BBC and the Guardian are moving beyond merely padding out websites with user-generated content to reconfiguring how news is gathered, disseminated and consumed.
How might these new technological developments and the enthusiasm for participation allow museums of science and technology to broaden and deepen their engagement of audiences with history?
Conflicting attitudes towards science have an impact on the public’s relationship with museums of science and technology.
“People in this country think science is a bit nerdy and boring and something you do up to GSCEs and no further,” says Oliver Green, a research fellow at the London Transport Museum.
“So it becomes easy for museums of science to fall into the trap of thinking our main audience is kids, and what kids want is interactives, and what we need is to turn the place into an interactive centre for kids. There are so many missed opportunities.”
Jim Bennett, the director of the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, says that one of the problems is that visitors tend to believe that a science museum knows better and, as a result, they often think their role in a museum is passive: “They even apologise for not understanding, which is ridiculous,” he says.
“People don’t go into an Egyptian gallery and apologise for not reading hieroglyphics. Visitors actually bring an awful lot of understanding with them but they are not always allowed to realise it because science museums tend to slip into a teacherly role.”
One issue that science museums have had is reconciling the presentation of today’s “gee-whizz” cutting-edge developments with their role as custodians of historical collections.
“Scientists understand that science comes out of an immediate and direct engagement with the natural world,” says Bennett. “And although scientists know that they have a ‘history,’ they are uneasy about how that history, in all its totality and strangeness, could have led to where we are now.
“There’s quite a profound epistemological issue at stake in how science museums integrate the past into an explanation of what science is doing now.”
There’s broad agreement that museums of science and technology need to find compelling ways of linking together the presentation of science’s past with present developments and future debates, and that harnessing public enthusiasms might be one way to do this.
Recent audience research carried out by London’s Science Museum suggests that visitors are enthusiastic about finding out about the history of science even though they are appreciably unsure of what it is.
“It is high time we upped our game in telling the rich and intriguing stories of our historical collections and the contexts from which they come,” says Tim Boon, chief curator at the Science Museum.
“The key to this is what visitors already carry in their heads. History is a hugely popular leisure pursuit; the job of a science museum is to open up the relations between visitor interests in history in general and the history of science and technology in particular.”
Family historians, for example, might find a museum’s industrial and scientific objects help them better understand the lives of their ancestors.
Indeed, one of the encouraging findings of the Science Museum’s research was that visitors saw it as a good place to learn history and an enjoyable supplement to going to historical sites, watching documentaries and reading historical fiction.
“Rather than formulae or complicated technology, I’d like to see museums of science and technology make more use of personal connections,” argues Green.
“The Imperial War Museum, for example, is as much a museum of social history as a military museum. But there are no museums of science telling the social history of civilian technology as ambitiously as it does.”
The Science Museum hosted an international workshop on co-curation and public history last year and has begun a project exploring the use of external groups in the organisation of displays in museum development. But to date, co-curation has been limited, in particular in terms of working with collections.
Perhaps some of the most successful co-curation projects have involved artists working with anomalous, unusual or neglected collections. Manchester Art Gallery invited artists, researchers and school groups to rummage through the Mary Greg collection, an idiosyncratic range of everyday objects mainly from the pre-industrial age.
As their Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary blog attests, the experiment not only stimulated a broad spectrum of public activity but also demonstrated how the process of co-curation helped the gallery rethink the uses and importance of the collection.
The Museum of the History of Science in Oxford has already proved that such techniques can be successfully applied to museums of science and technology. Its Steampunk exhibition (13 October 2009-21 February 2010) became the museum’s most successful show.
It featured sculptures by 18 artists whose work relates to Steampunk, a sub-genre of science fiction that evokes an era where steam power is still widely used, usually Victorian Britain.
“People came out of the exhibition into a gallery of Victorian objects that had a steampunk-like sensibility,” says Bennett.
“What was interesting is that visitors took the sensibility of the art show with them into the gallery. They treated the objects with a kind of visual respect that they would not have done if they had just walked into a gallery of Victorian objects.”
The Steampunk exhibition was engaged with the visual aesthetic of Victorian science rather than the science itself, but Bennett is unrepentant.
“The benefit of co-curation was that it introduced us to a world that we had no idea that existed. It made us look at our collections in a new way. You have to be open-minded to recognise the value of that.”
Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum, has argued that co-curation can only work if a museum takes the contribution of participants seriously. The starting place needs to be: “In what ways could our museum benefit from the contributions of the public?”
Curators can be understandably resistant to the idea of ceding authority but, as Simon makes clear, successful co-curation demands the fuller input of curators rather than the abdication of responsibility.
No one else is as well placed to creatively manage the scope of the public’s input. But co-curation is a time-consuming process and one fraught with creative, organisational and logistical difficulties.
Museums of science and technology inhabit a world of maturing technologies and evolving audience expectations, which has consequences for how they narrate history. How to apply the lessons of this brave new world to the material strengths of a museum is a daunting task.
“We will grasp what we need to do when we understand better how people apply their existing experience when they encounter museum displays,” says Boon.
“Co-curation of many kinds is currently the best route to that enhanced understanding.”
Scott Anthony is a freelance journalist
There will be a session exploring science displays at the Museums Association conference (3-4 October, Brighton)
Click here for more information
Museum in the mix
Staff at the Science Museum have been using a range of co-curation techniques to learn more about how different people understand the history of science and technology.
The museum’s latest project is OraMix, which has been using theatre, music and sound to explore young adults’ responses to the Science Museum’s collection.
This has involved participants in the National Youth Theatre’s (NYT) Playing Up2 course, and students from City University’s BA in Creative Industries, visiting the museum over a two-month period. The aim was to attract more young adults, as this age group often stops visiting museums once they leave school.
The participants were asked to make the museum’s collection more attractive and relevant to their peers. As part of this, they talked to curators, scientists and other museum professionals. They also looked at attitudes to science and museums among their own age group.
“The young people that the participants spoke to often saw museums as quite rigid institutions and thought that museums were to do with school,” says Holly Jones, who developed the OraMix project with the Science Museum alongside Nicola Jennings, a colleague at Together Productions.
The participants found that young adults were interested in events at museums and wanted to get marketing information via online networks such as Facebook.
Activity at the museum centred on the Oramics machine, invented in the late 1960s by Daphne Oram, the electronic music composer who co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. The museum recently acquired the machine with the help of Goldsmiths College.
OraMix culminated in site-specific performances held at the museum in late March and early April.