The first thing to strike me about the Science Museum's new Energy Gallery was, well, the energy. All around children were jumping, stamping, clapping their hands.
The gallery is, as the museum website promises, an 'energy playground', an 'interactive gallery where children aged seven to 14, their teachers and families, can explore how energy powers every aspect of their lives'.
The Energy Gallery is a gallery not of objects, but computer-based interactives. What is innovative, however, is how the interaction is managed. Rather than hunching over desktop monitors, the young visitors must use their whole bodies to interact.
They spin vast drums to bring up multiple choice options, rotate the touchscreen podium to move the picture on the screen, stamp on footpads, mime digging, or clap their hands to bring up the next picture. From the enthusiasm with which these things are all done, this is clearly an approach which appeals.
Despite its name, the subject matter of the gallery is not 'energy' in the abstract, scientific sense, but the human use of energy. This people-centred approach is evident from the language that constantly addresses and involves the viewer: 'Is this your energy future?'; 'World energy: you are in charge'; 'Energy: our world, your choice', run some of the section titles.
The text, which is well written and laid out clearly, is imaginative and involving. 'What if meat was used to make energy?' asks one panel in Energy Futures. 'You might have to feed hamsters to your TV!'
There are also artworks in the gallery, one concerned with the artist's attachment to speed, and the other, 'Do Not Touch', which delivers a mild electric shock to anyone who touches it. The largest exhibit is the 'Energy Ring', a giant metal ring suspended in the middle of the museum with visitor comments on the theme of energy whizzing around it.
Although those I saw were not particularly insightful ('everyone should stop using fossil fuels'), this was a useful addition because it drew the eye towards the galleries below, enabling connections to be made with the museum's collections.
The underlying message of the gallery has been clearly conceived, and could probably be summarised as follows: 'We are dependent on energy which, in the developed world, we derive mostly from fossil fuels, for almost every aspect of our lives. However, resources of fossil fuels are limited and we must find ways to use energy more efficiently and develop new and sustainable sources of energy.'
The simplicity of this message, together with the success of the interactives in grabbing your attention, make this a gallery which gets its message across pretty well. It would be hard to play the game where you choose the most efficient way to keep warm, without learning that some ways are more efficient than others.
These are, however, rather simple messages, and the gallery may well prove to be more suitable for children at the lower end of the stated seven-to-14 age group.
For those wanting more knowledge about a particular theme there are 'energy info zones' - touchscreen computers that offer a further range of games, activities, stories to read and definitions.
Although just as fun, accessible and well-designed as everything else in the gallery, these seemed to me to represent a lost opportunity for greater scientific depth as well as breadth.
If a puzzled child were to wonder, 'What is energy?' he or she would be given no help by the definition available in the info zone, which merely repeats what we have already been told - 'energy powers our lives, giving us light, warmth, transport and much more. We use energy from the world around us - eg from oil, uranium, wind or flowing water - to make electricity and fuel.'
The explanation of alternating current was similarly unhelpful: 'It's a type of electricity. The electricity that comes out of the sockets in our homes is in this form. It's the best way of sending electricity down cables from a power station.'
Children, no less than adults, can be interested not only in questions of 'how does it affect me?', but also 'what is it?' and 'how does it work?'. On the day I visited, 'Michael Faraday', alias one of the museum's talented team of communicators, was drawing small crowds by explaining electric current armed only with a handful of tennis balls.
Judging by the buzz and sheer enjoyment it was generating, Energy is likely to be a hit with children and their parents or teachers.
The success with which it gets across its message about the effect energy has on people will make it a terrific resource for teachers aiming to educate their classes (or kids aiming to educate their parents). Perhaps the science content could be improved using the info zone monitors to make a more rounded experience.
Ingenious - a treasure trove of fascinating objects
Accompanying the opening of Energy, the museum has chosen a similar theme for its first 'Ingenious' exhibition.
Ingenious is also a lottery-funded, web-based project, subtitled Seeing Things Differently. Where the website 'brings together images and viewpoints to create insights into science and culture', the temporary exhibition programme brings together both the viewpoints and the objects themselves.
Approached via Energy, Ingenious is situated at right angles to it, along two sides of the rectangle formed around the main court of the museum. The exhibition represents a treasure trove of fascinating objects, densely arranged in long lines.
Ranging in size from a small car to a toy mincer, they have been chosen to relate to our use of energy - in transport, at work ('clocking in, starting up, logging on') and home ('tuning in, switching on, heating up').
The exhibition succeeds brilliantly in its use of text, pitched beautifully in terms of quantity and content. Labels of about 60 words are placed in front of the objects, easy to locate, and not intrusive. Many objects are provided with two labels, colour-coded to make their different purposes obvious: purple on white for basic information, white on purple for curatorial or visitor comments and extra 'did you know?' chunks.
The tone is conversational, for the non-expert adult: 'Remember Windy Miller in Camberwick Green?' asks one label. The approach to the history of technology that we see here is one that draws on cultural, social and design history, rather than the progressive account of technological development formerly associated with science museums.
Ingenious draws skilfully on a combination of curatorial expertise and visitor responses. We learn about the 19th-century controversy over electricity distribution, but we also share the realisation of Jake, aged eight, on seeing a 1935-55 rechargeable battery that 'if Game Boy batteries were this big it would be very hard to carry it around', and some insight about using the charcoal iron that reminds Taiwo 'of ironing my Dad's traditional robes in Nigeria... I had to ensure the ironing surface was clean so as not to smear soot on the robes - especially the white ones.'
Katharine Edgar is a lecturer in archaeological curatorship at the University of Leicester
Project data: Energy Gallery
Cost: £2m
Sponsors: BP, The Vodafone Group Foundation and BASF
Exhibition artists and designers: Allofus, Blast Theory, Casson Mann, Christian Moeller, Dunne & Raby, Soda, Spiral, Mike Stubbs, Plant and Land Transmedia, KRD and Robson & Jones
For more information, contact: Kirsten Harvey (020 7942 4352)
The gallery is, as the museum website promises, an 'energy playground', an 'interactive gallery where children aged seven to 14, their teachers and families, can explore how energy powers every aspect of their lives'.
The Energy Gallery is a gallery not of objects, but computer-based interactives. What is innovative, however, is how the interaction is managed. Rather than hunching over desktop monitors, the young visitors must use their whole bodies to interact.
They spin vast drums to bring up multiple choice options, rotate the touchscreen podium to move the picture on the screen, stamp on footpads, mime digging, or clap their hands to bring up the next picture. From the enthusiasm with which these things are all done, this is clearly an approach which appeals.
Despite its name, the subject matter of the gallery is not 'energy' in the abstract, scientific sense, but the human use of energy. This people-centred approach is evident from the language that constantly addresses and involves the viewer: 'Is this your energy future?'; 'World energy: you are in charge'; 'Energy: our world, your choice', run some of the section titles.
The text, which is well written and laid out clearly, is imaginative and involving. 'What if meat was used to make energy?' asks one panel in Energy Futures. 'You might have to feed hamsters to your TV!'
There are also artworks in the gallery, one concerned with the artist's attachment to speed, and the other, 'Do Not Touch', which delivers a mild electric shock to anyone who touches it. The largest exhibit is the 'Energy Ring', a giant metal ring suspended in the middle of the museum with visitor comments on the theme of energy whizzing around it.
Although those I saw were not particularly insightful ('everyone should stop using fossil fuels'), this was a useful addition because it drew the eye towards the galleries below, enabling connections to be made with the museum's collections.
The underlying message of the gallery has been clearly conceived, and could probably be summarised as follows: 'We are dependent on energy which, in the developed world, we derive mostly from fossil fuels, for almost every aspect of our lives. However, resources of fossil fuels are limited and we must find ways to use energy more efficiently and develop new and sustainable sources of energy.'
The simplicity of this message, together with the success of the interactives in grabbing your attention, make this a gallery which gets its message across pretty well. It would be hard to play the game where you choose the most efficient way to keep warm, without learning that some ways are more efficient than others.
These are, however, rather simple messages, and the gallery may well prove to be more suitable for children at the lower end of the stated seven-to-14 age group.
For those wanting more knowledge about a particular theme there are 'energy info zones' - touchscreen computers that offer a further range of games, activities, stories to read and definitions.
Although just as fun, accessible and well-designed as everything else in the gallery, these seemed to me to represent a lost opportunity for greater scientific depth as well as breadth.
If a puzzled child were to wonder, 'What is energy?' he or she would be given no help by the definition available in the info zone, which merely repeats what we have already been told - 'energy powers our lives, giving us light, warmth, transport and much more. We use energy from the world around us - eg from oil, uranium, wind or flowing water - to make electricity and fuel.'
The explanation of alternating current was similarly unhelpful: 'It's a type of electricity. The electricity that comes out of the sockets in our homes is in this form. It's the best way of sending electricity down cables from a power station.'
Children, no less than adults, can be interested not only in questions of 'how does it affect me?', but also 'what is it?' and 'how does it work?'. On the day I visited, 'Michael Faraday', alias one of the museum's talented team of communicators, was drawing small crowds by explaining electric current armed only with a handful of tennis balls.
Judging by the buzz and sheer enjoyment it was generating, Energy is likely to be a hit with children and their parents or teachers.
The success with which it gets across its message about the effect energy has on people will make it a terrific resource for teachers aiming to educate their classes (or kids aiming to educate their parents). Perhaps the science content could be improved using the info zone monitors to make a more rounded experience.
Ingenious - a treasure trove of fascinating objects
Accompanying the opening of Energy, the museum has chosen a similar theme for its first 'Ingenious' exhibition.
Ingenious is also a lottery-funded, web-based project, subtitled Seeing Things Differently. Where the website 'brings together images and viewpoints to create insights into science and culture', the temporary exhibition programme brings together both the viewpoints and the objects themselves.
Approached via Energy, Ingenious is situated at right angles to it, along two sides of the rectangle formed around the main court of the museum. The exhibition represents a treasure trove of fascinating objects, densely arranged in long lines.
Ranging in size from a small car to a toy mincer, they have been chosen to relate to our use of energy - in transport, at work ('clocking in, starting up, logging on') and home ('tuning in, switching on, heating up').
The exhibition succeeds brilliantly in its use of text, pitched beautifully in terms of quantity and content. Labels of about 60 words are placed in front of the objects, easy to locate, and not intrusive. Many objects are provided with two labels, colour-coded to make their different purposes obvious: purple on white for basic information, white on purple for curatorial or visitor comments and extra 'did you know?' chunks.
The tone is conversational, for the non-expert adult: 'Remember Windy Miller in Camberwick Green?' asks one label. The approach to the history of technology that we see here is one that draws on cultural, social and design history, rather than the progressive account of technological development formerly associated with science museums.
Ingenious draws skilfully on a combination of curatorial expertise and visitor responses. We learn about the 19th-century controversy over electricity distribution, but we also share the realisation of Jake, aged eight, on seeing a 1935-55 rechargeable battery that 'if Game Boy batteries were this big it would be very hard to carry it around', and some insight about using the charcoal iron that reminds Taiwo 'of ironing my Dad's traditional robes in Nigeria... I had to ensure the ironing surface was clean so as not to smear soot on the robes - especially the white ones.'
Katharine Edgar is a lecturer in archaeological curatorship at the University of Leicester
Project data: Energy Gallery
Cost: £2m
Sponsors: BP, The Vodafone Group Foundation and BASF
Exhibition artists and designers: Allofus, Blast Theory, Casson Mann, Christian Moeller, Dunne & Raby, Soda, Spiral, Mike Stubbs, Plant and Land Transmedia, KRD and Robson & Jones
For more information, contact: Kirsten Harvey (020 7942 4352)
