Ten years from now science in museums could be unrecognisable. The Natural History Museum, Science Museum and Manchester Museum amongst others are in the initial stages of planning for major changes that will start in the next few years. Include the 2007 opening of Wellcome Collection – the Wellcome Trust’s new public venue – and it’s an exciting time for science exhibitions. But what are we going to see in these new displays? Before museums can begin to answer that question they have to unpack the buzz-words and initiatives that come with communicating science. This is far from simple, and poses some tricky questions for everyone involved in science exhibitions.
Perhaps uniquely amongst museum subjects, communicating ideas and information about science has been strongly advocated by successive governments and other organisations for many years. Through this diverse and wide-ranging community, in which museums play an active role, has come a series of movements and initiatives. For a long time the most prominent of these was ‘public understanding of science’. This advocated putting lots of exciting science facts ‘out there’ in an effort to get people to learn to love science. Now discredited as grossly top-down, it has been superceded by ‘public engagement with science’ (PES) and its attendant mot-du-jour ‘dialogue’. Speak to curators about science and you can bet the conversation will be framed by PES.
However, this participatory model is not without its own critics and difficulties. Not least amongst these is the question, ‘what does it actually mean?’ What does ‘public engagement with science’ want to do? “I think that’s a big question because ‘public engagement’ is banded around as a term and actually everyone is meaning something quite different,” says Caroline Hurren, head of the Public Engagement Development Group at the Wellcome Trust. Paul Bowers of the Natural History Museum is more blunt: “Public, engagement, and science are three words that no-one questions.” As head of public offer for Darwin Centre phase 2 (DC2) Bowers is someone who thinks about this more than most. But surely such lack of questioning makes life difficult for museums thinking about redevelopment and talking about PES?
The obvious meanings of ‘public engagement with science’ and ‘dialogue’ are that museum visitors should be able to comment on and influence policy decisions. However, this can be problematic as Curren explains: “Influencing policy is very difficult and few [organisations] do it… The public can end up feeling quite used if they think they’re feeding into something but actually it’s just an exercise in dialogue.” The Science Museum has first hand experience of the difficulty in making this kind of dialogue ‘real’. Heather Mayfield, deputy director of the museum, says that it experimented with visitor comments on subjects displayed in Antenna exhibitions but had difficulty tying exhibitions into existing consultations. The varied nature of the comments also meant that they weren’t useful for academic organisations such as Sussex University’s Mass Observation Unit. Now the museum favours giving visitors information about consultations that they can follow up at home.
But if canvassing opinion is a red herring for PES in museums, that still leaves the question ‘what is it?’ Well, ask around and two themes stand out: the process of science and what might broadly be called ‘science in the round’ or ‘cultural context’. Needless to say, neither of these is particularly easy.
Hurren thinks of ‘process of science’ as “how science works things out, how science thinks about things. Why does the media always portray us as changing our minds about things?” She argues that science is often portrayed in terms of its output – results – rather than how that output comes to be, and this is very often the case in museums. DC2, partly funded by Wellcome Trust, aims “to show science as a human activity.” The building will combine laboratories with public spaces and visitors will be able to peer into the labs. But how will this show the human side of science? “The lab’s empty because they’ve all gone for coffee” replies Bowers, implying a ‘science is just a job’ approach.
There is certainly value in showing science is a job like any other, with long coffee breaks and few bearded geeks, but it doesn’t solve Hurren’s problem. The reason science is “always changing its mind” is that it builds to an official position over a period of many years. That debate mostly takes place in the wider scientific community, not in a single lab. Even experimentation and analysis are slow processes at the best of times, so visitors hoping to see heated discussions of the latest data might be disappointed. Meantime philosophers and sociologists have been arguing for centuries about what science is and how it works. They are still going strong. To say there is a wide range of opinions would be an understatement, but no one would honestly say there is a process. ‘Live science’ in the form of viewing a lab may not be material for a one-off visit if your goal is to show ‘the process of science’, whatever that may be.
That’s not to say that presenting science as a ‘human activity’ is undesirable. One thing that many academics would agree on is that the ‘output’ Hurren speaks of is created through interactions of science and society – that science is socially and culturally situated – which is another way of thinking about science as a human activity. Ken Arnold, Wellcome Trust’s head of public programmes, explains: “Science doesn’t stop with the science, you have to draw on the history, and it doesn’t stop with the history, you have to contemplate interfaces with science and culture.” In other words, the interaction of science and society is complex and ill defined. Presenting what Arnold calls “science in the round” can’t be done in a neat, clean fashion. This poses some interesting questions for museum displays.
Nick Merriman, director of The Manchester Museum, describes a recent project which explored gender in the museum’s natural history galleries. It showed that the great majority of the exhibits were male, and that C19th taxidermists (and presumably more recent designers) had displayed these most prominently. Merriman concludes, “Science displays aren’t truthful any more than humanities displays are truthful. What we’re displaying is a cultural construct with very particular historical contingencies.” To address this Merriman is keen on incorporating multiple interpretations of exhibits into displays, but this is also problematic. Merriman agrees: “There’s a thousand ways of looking at things. Even if we work with a community there’s the issue of who selects the community representatives, how representative are they … who do you ask? You still have to edit. … We have to put some things in and exclude others.” In other words, the role of the museum as editor, and the perception of museums as authoritative institutions are central to this cultural construct In order to highlight and explore science and society – to give an alternative to the presentation of ‘fact’ – museums will need to be transparent about what they have put on display, how it has been interpreted and why.
Of course, there is no single way to present science in museums. But given that PES is framing the majority of proposals, it is important to think about what is feasible. How then can museums approach the complex task of working out which route to take and then how to do it? Two features stand out. First is that no one can do this in isolation and yet there seems to be very little discussion of these issues between museums, or between museums and the academic science studies / museum studies communities. Science studies academics in particular have been discussing questions of representation of science for years and could make valuable contributions. Wellcome Trust launched a PES publication “Engaging Science: Thoughts, deeds, analysis and action” in July and sponsored a multi-disciplinary science communication conference last April, but this type of discussion needs to be extended. In the meantime the museums community could be proactive.
The second feature is one of experimentation. Arnold, Merriman, Mayfield and Bowers all emphasise the need and desire to try out new ideas. But such experimentation requires risk taking and money, a combination that doesn’t always go hand-in-hand. Even when innovative projects are funded, additional money for tweaking and embedding the ideas isn’t necessarily forthcoming, a situation acknowledged by Hurren. Finding a way round this hurdle would be extremely useful.
There is hard work ahead. Figuring out what contribution museums can realistically make to science communication is an important starting point. Presenting a more rounded view of science is a great aim, but will challenge conventional means of display and interpretation; and to meet those challenges museums themselves need to engage with others in the field. These are exciting times for science museums.
This article was first published in Museums Journal in August 2006.
Rachel Souhami 