What If…Part 4
a sense of permission
The final part of the Project What If story. Thanks for reading if you’ve come this far.
Our brief to the designers at Kossmann de Jong was one I knew they were already on board with after I’d visited their studio in Amsterdam and introduced them to this backstory. They were really up for experimenting with a different way of approaching a science exhibition. How could we:
- Create a space that makes you feel something before you’ve even interacted with an exhibit
- Create a sense of theatre
- Design connected constellations of exhibits that explore a central question from all angles and disciplines
- Celebrate the golden word that sums up the experience of our exhibition spaces, compared to many art galleries and museums — PERMISSION. Permission to lie on the floor and make a phone call, to giggle, to run around pressing stuff, to bring your true self and all your friends. We wanted to make space for people to bring their own experiences and ideas and questions
- Make the exhibition as sustainably and accessibly as possible.
The lead designer, Michel, brought an inspiring philosophy of presenting exhibits in a science context as though they are art. Not in terms of reverence or atmosphere of an art gallery, but in stripping back the exhibit design so that the phenomena, the idea in question, is foregrounded as a beautiful aesthetic object that you are drawn to interact with, without overwrought setwork getting in the way.
We worked hard to combine a cohesive and beautiful aesthetic style with maximum function and accessible design. There is no argument for me about form vs content. They come together always. The beauty of a great exhibit is made in all these elements working in harmony.
The brief and the seed that started it all has been realised through the incredibly varied and brilliant skills of many teams sharing the vision, and their talents — from content researchers, producers, project managers, exhibit and experience designers, engineers and fabricators, digital designers, software and tech developers to the question askers, community exhibit designers, the interpretation writer, lighting designer, artists and video producers, testing groups and advisors, contributors, Curious Researchers, Open City Lab researchers…..it was so exhilarating to be in rooms with people who not only know how to make it all work, they know how to make it even better.
I think we achieved what we set out to do. I hope you can visit Project What If at some point, whenever the current world allows. We did our best to test it with as many people as possible, from start to finish. Some exhibits won’t be perfect, some will be just as we imagined, all will find different meanings for different people. It all comes alive with people, it’s nothing without everyone involved as active participants.
There’s so much more to say, but I’ll perhaps visit the other elements of Project What If later on. There’s Make Space, where we set an intention to fully co-design an exhibit in each constellation with a community group and an artist. The community group selected both the question and an artist they were interested in working with, and their work is exhibited alongside everything else. And there’s Open City Lab, a working research space where people can encounter real science in progress, which has been in development with a pilot programme and energetic researchers for two years now. Not forgetting the digital question space, and the Theatre of Curiosity, but you’ll work those out yourselves without more words from me.
Meantime, I hope that everyone will find a new favourite exhibit or indeed, favourite question. It’s for adults reawakening or extending their curiosity as much as the tiniest toddlers to press and poke and play. It is a place to revel in the wobbly knee feeling of not knowing something. It’s a place for you, for running around, for quiet corners to sit down and think, for laughter, and conversation.
And now, as a 5 yr old or a 95 yr old you can run from making your arm invisible, straight through the doors of a working science lab hopefully without even realising it. Where you won’t be interrupting the researchers, they’re there specifically because you running into them is what they need for their research, for you to participate.
It’s where I hope you will FEEL something about ideas in science and start to have conversations that place it as part of our collective cultures.
I hope that this is the start of other conversations too, about who gets to ‘do’ science and where. About dissolving hierarchies of knowledge and power and creating ecosystems of question askers and explorers in which your contribution is not just valued but necessary.
Because of course, it doesn’t matter how hard we work at engaging audiences with science, how carefully we design our exhibits for users of all physical abilities, or how inclusive we are in our practice, unless science itself starts to change for the better too. At the time of writing, the latest stats tell us that only 0.7% of professors in science in the UK are black. Only 16% of the tech workforce is female. I can’t even find decent stats on the representation of people who identify as LGBTQ+ or as disabled working in STEM — Science. Technology, Maths and Engineering. It’s clear to me that the time has come for science engagement practitioners to be activists for change not just communicators of information.
And if you’re reading this outside Bristol, near a city, chances are you’re near another science centre also with a brilliant project funded by Inspiring Science. Science centres, like everyone, are facing tough times. They don’t qualify for the cultural recovery fund nor museum heritage funding, despite being important parts of both. The quest to have science understood as part of culture continues. Do support with a visit if you are able.
“….science centres should be risk-taking pioneers, they should act and not wait..”
“….they should be a locus for crossings between science and life…”
“the new type of science centre cannot merely be a science centre as it has been until now. . . . the new type will be more like a power station (kraftwerk), a producer of new energy.”
These are re-imagined quotes from Alexander Dorner, an influential 20th Century museum director, where ‘science centre’ and ‘science’ are substituted in place of ‘museums’ ‘art’ and ‘art institute’. I came across Alexander Dorner via Hans Ulrich Obrist’s book, Ways of Curating, and continue to use them as runway lights as I start my new story of work beyond We the Curious, and think about evolving cultural institutions and exhibition experiences.
I’ll finish with a quote that was deliberately misattributed to me by the brilliant project what if team. But I’ll shamelessly take it on now, in all its saccharine glory.
‘teamwork makes the dream work.’
I know. (sorry not sorry)
But it is true, and ending with this I hope will make some very dedicated and hardworking people smile.
Here’s to the question askers and the curious explorers, to the museum rule breakers who’ve laid the path, and to the future curators of ideas and dreamers of things we haven’t even imagined yet, because that’s really the point of it all.
Here’s to all our What If’’s.
.
.
.
I’ve finished each of these blogs with a What If question to ponder. Here are some What If’s I’m interested in investigating in my next chapter of thinking and work….I’m excited to hear yours too.
What If…we bring ecosystem thinking to the role and place of museums in our communities….(and what if museums are the underground fungi network communicating between the rest of the woodland, not the big sticky out trees?)
What If…we open up access to ideas by exploring the in-between space between museum exhibit, art installation and experiment…..
What If…we go deeper into a hybrid creative practice that is part scientific experiment, part artistic inquiry
What If…there were a national research budget allocated to participatory citizen research…where would this take us in solutions to the wicked problems of climate change, transportation, cleaner cities…
