Over the past two decades the landscape of science museums has been transformed by the creation of a fleet of interactive science centres. But this cannot hide the fact that there is much to be done to make the history of science and technology in museums more effective for visitors.
Science museums often have a problem with history. Science, in the public mind, is strongly aligned with the future and the present, and it is often assumed that museums’ key role is to communicate the better world that science and technology promise to provide.
Given that promoting science as an instrument of human betterment has been a dominant mode of popular science for more than a century, this tendency is scarcely surprising. But there are important reasons for museums to continue to strive for better displays on the history of science that really register with audiences.
The first reason relates to what museums do. Our fundamental purposes relate to the collections we curate for the public benefit. Objects can be used to show abstract scientific principles, but interactive displays in science centres often do this better. The principal power of objects is their ability to stimulate understanding of the past.
Unlike in art museums, where the objects are the subject, we have often indulged in a self-defeating rhetoric in science museums, where objects are considered to be at one stage removed from the subject, which is taken to be science in the sense of the abstract understanding of nature.
But if you consider the role of objects in our ancestors’ lives, the range of possibilities is much wider. The candlestick telephone in the Science Museum’s Making the Modern World gallery has the same relation to the history of social life as Pisanello’s Vision of St Eustace in the National Gallery has to the history of the spiritual life. It is the product of particular people and practices in the past, whose visual qualities visitors can explore and enjoy, however little – or much – they know of the history.
The second reason relates to visitors. Surveys show that science has negative connotations for audiences when it is closest to their experience of how they were taught it at school, as abstract principles. But audience research for the Science Museum’s new galleries has revealed that identification between the visitor and people in history can provide strong engagement with objects.
Here is a major opportunity for co-curation: history matters to millions of people, as shown by the growth in ‘public history’, such as the history that people do for fun as a family and the historical ‘reality shows’ they watch on television.
A workshop at the Science Museum in October debated co-curation and the public history of science and technology with an audience of 80 museum staff, historians and media professionals. It was apparent that there is much for science museums to learn from co-curation projects in Britain and internationally. But it was also evident that the techniques of audience engagement have rarely been applied to history, still less to the histories of science and technology.
Museum collections represent the greatest untapped capital for public engagement with the history of science and technology, but we have done too little to engage the historian that exists in every one of our visitors.
This is essential if we are to revive the core business of science museums, the thing that distinguishes them from science centres: showing and making sense of collections.
Tim Boon is the chief curator of the Science Museum, London
