Thinking Scientifically

Interest in science museums and scientific collections seems to be increasing at the moment. Recent issues of the Museums Journal have featured two title articles discussing how science collections can best be made engaging to a non-specialist public. Hot topics like climate change, communications and design are particularly popular. But, how can these collections be best exploited?

Most British readers, and many foreign visitors, will remember fondly trips to the Science Museum’s ‘Launch Pad’ gallery in their younger days, but for many this will be more for its fun, interactive nature, than for any scientific knowledge there gained. The essential problem is how to utilise historic scientific collections, often characterised by objects both strange and fragile, which bear little resemblance to the objects of modern day science, without turning these displays into playgrounds? The Natural History Museum have approached this by putting their scientific practice itself on display in the new Darwin Centre (I will, in a future post, consider separately this question of turning people into museum objects), but I feel this is still kept strangely separate from their established collections, both in the physical space of the museum, and in the separate interpretative practices therein. The Science Museum has new high-tech galleries considering science in the news and climate science. Yet, likewise, I feel these are not integrated into the historic collections. The Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, has a more integrated idea, with exhibitions like the recent ‘Ethometric’ (discussed previously) and ‘Steampunk’ in 2009-10. These relate directly into the historic collections, while encouraging visitors to think differently about the practice of science and its objects.

I have been to two conferences recently which also considered such issues. Kingston University’s ‘Curating Science’ hosted at the Wellcome Collection in early May 2011 considered the question, I felt, from far too conceptual an idea of curation, and not from a concern with public engagement. There was also too great a focus on design as a scientific practice. What this did raise, for me, however was the importance of thinking about science as a visual practice, a question which was considered intensively at the 'European Spring School on History of Science and Popularization' last week. From the many discussions about pictures in, of and about scientific practice, I left with the strong conviction that this is how we should be seeking to engage visitors with scientific collections. As a historian, and historian of art, who now practices in a history of science department, I am often frustrated by the boundaries that are drawn between these parts of the discipline. Museums, I think, create similarly unnecessary boundaries. Science collections, need to be made, not more interactive, but more visual, such that visitors appreciate the visual nature of scientific practice and scientific results, and that these are interpretable and contestable in the same ways as the objects and practices that they elsewhere see as ‘art.’ Scientific collections are visual entities, this should be exploited not apologised for.