A tactile exploration of our planet in a room devoted to understanding the thriving
of life on earth.
Budding scientists at the helm.
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Barcelona’s
Science Museum
Opened in
1981, the La Caixa Foundation Science Museum is the first of its kind in Spain. Its
main aim is to spread scientific and technical knowledge among the general public,
especially students. To do this, it encourages contact between scientists, teachers
and scientific institutions. It covers an area of 7,000 square metres and another
30,000 are currently being added on.
To know
more:
www.fundacio.lacaixa.es
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Jorge
Wagensberg eavesdrops on visitors to the science museum he runs in Barcelona. The
conversations he overhears enable him to imagine the perfect museum—a place that
speaks to all the senses, especially touch
Some time ago I got
into the habit of leaving my office to eavesdrop on visitors in every nook and cranny
of the La Caixa Foundation Science Museum that I run in Barcelona. A lot of what
they say proves very interesting, and excellent food for thought about what a modern
science museum should aim to be.
Once, I was hot on the heels of a young father and his son of about seven. They paused
in front of a mimosa pudica plant whose leaves recoil when you touch them.
Father: Did you see that?
Boy: What? What’s happening? Hey! But is it real or not?
Father: It’s real. Don’t you see?
I lingered behind them as they approached a model of the Amazon that compresses a
day’s life in the rainforest into the space of 10 minutes, including an electrically-generated
storm, torrential rain and a rainbow. In the middle of the show, the entranced boy
looked up to his father and asked once again: “Dad, is this real or not?” To which
his father replied: “It isn’t real. . . Watch carefully!”
A few minutes later, at an underwater archaeology exhibit with a giant aquarium featuring
a sunken ship and huge moray fish swimming between the furniture in the captain’s
cabin, I heard another exchange:
Boy: They’re real, aren’t they?
Father: Of course. You can see that.
Boy: And the furniture?
Father: Hmm. I don’t know. I think some of it is.
The boy’s metaphysical obsession—about whether things are real or not, about the
difference between experience and theory, between a replica and “the actual thing”—was
much stronger than his father’s. Unwittingly, this young visitor reopened a critical
debate in our museum over when to use a real-life object, when to use a replica and
whether the two can be combined.
In any case it’s clear what a museum must not do: namely boil down its exhibits to
excerpts from a book whose crammed pages can be read by the long-suffering visitors
as they walk down a hallway into rooms full of scale models for demonstrations and
videos and computers that look like shopfronts of electrical stores. One of the most
elementary mistakes made by today’s museums is to forget that the absolute priority
is to be real.
Just as classes, conferences and seminars are based mainly on the spoken word, cinema
and television on images and books and magazines on the written word, museums and
exhibitions should focus on the real object or event. For it is the prospect of encountering
reality that draws people to museums.
In recent years, science museums have been at the vanguard in terms of changing their
collections, methods and engagement with the public. Our slogan these days is “please
touch.” The old concept of the display case has been replaced by that of experience,
and the academic label has changed into a more literary one. Above all, the former
highbrow attitude has been overtaken by an effort to involve all five human senses.
A
careful mixture of touch, feelings and thought
Another
thing I’ve learnt on my strolls around the museum is that we still have a long way
to go before youngsters feel comfortable there. I recently came across a little girl,
no more than six years old, throwing large stones at a wooden open-air kiosk used
in summertime as an ice-cream shop. It was winter and the kiosk was closed. I reached
her just as she was about to throw another stone. As soon as she saw me, she dropped
it and looked down shamefacedly. I stood there silently for a moment before she looked
up, gazed at the kiosk, then turned to me and asked: “Is that yours?”
To get our young visitors to treat things in the museum with care, they have to feel
they have a stake in them. Though it is not easy, one way is to try to stimulate
their senses. In a science museum, the most effective stimuli are a careful mixture
of touch, feelings and thought.
Let’s take a few examples. Once I quietly shadowed a boy of about 10 into the museum’s
big vivarium, which had an exhibit called “Invisible Stillness.” At first he saw
nothing. But behind the glass and amid dry leaves, earth and roots, lived three dozen
stick-insects (Extetosoma tiaratum). The boy was puzzled and looked around, clearly
annoyed. He must have thought it was a joke or that the exhibit was being repaired.
Then he spotted a notice saying: “There are 30 big insects in here.” With an incredulous
look, he seemed to be wondering how so many insects could be invisible in such a
small space. Then he saw them—one... two... three. “Hey, now I get it! There they
are,” I heard him say as I watched his face light up. His eyes had been looking at
the insects, but his brain hadn’t seen them. That is emotional interaction. The boy,
like many other visitors, was enthralled by everything he saw after that.
Next to the vivarium is a window in which you can see a mass of scattered dots with
no discernible pattern. If the visitor touches a lever, some of the dots arrange
themselves into the shape of an animal. This is an example of genuine manual interactivity:
move the lever and the animal appears; release it and the creature disappears before
your eyes.
It is a small trick that arouses the imagination and makes the point that many hunted
animals stay absolutely still when a predator is terrifyingly close to them. Applied
in daily life (why do we wave to attract the attention of a waiter who pretends not
to see us?), it explains what mental interactivity means, and allows the visitor
to make comparisons and even reinterpret previous experiences.
The main job of a modern museum should be to go beyond preserving heritage, informing,
training and even teaching, and to generate this kind of excitement through objects
and real phenomena. People can then physically experience the feelings of the scientist,
who is not seeking either good or evil but simply trying, like anyone else, to come
up with as much knowledge as he or she can about the world in an effort to make humanity’s
cosmic solitude bearable. That’s why scientists do experiments—they are endeavouring
to converse with nature. A museum should strive to make visitors plunge like divers
into the scientist’s quest.
For
the best ideas, tune into the young
Based
on my experience as a museum director and eavesdropper, I think we should pay close
attention to what children say, because we might learn something from youngsters
who are learning themselves. Our museum is for people of all ages or education. But
the youngest visitors have what turn out to be certain very good ideas. So we must
tune into their thoughts, like those of two boys and their mother as they were coming
out of our large weather exhibition. One boy was about 10 and the other about five
and had to run to keep up. The 10-year-old seemed annoyed.
Boy, 10: Mum! Mum! What’s in the Amazon?
Mother: OK, we’ll go and see. But maybe you’ll be disappointed.
And then from somewhere behind me, a little voice.
Boy, 5: Mum?
Mother: Yes dear?
Boy, 5: What’s disappointed? |
