Technorama in Wintertur, Switzerland

Technorama is the result of the re-invention of an historical technology museum into a vibrant science center in Winterthur, Switzerland. It is the only science center in the country, but with 500 hands-on exhibits, there is plenty of opportunity to go around.
The process started in 1991 with the replacement of a group of historical objects with a set of phenomenon-based hands-on exhibits. At the end of the venue, the museum kept the most successful exhibits as permanent. They repeated this process over the years and have now replaced all of the original historical objects (which are still safe in storage)

I was particularly impressed with the robustness of the exhibits. Of exhibits on display, I noticed only one that was out of order. About one-half of the exhibits have Exploratorium origins, but many have been re-engineered over the years. As a result, they are the best-functioning exhibits I have seen in 40 years of visiting science museums.

Technorama has regular floor programs that range from big and impressive (a show on gases that includes a number of big, impressive explosions and a great high-voltage show) to moderate-sized (a Coriolis-effect show delights about 50 visitors at a time, 20 of whom sit inside a spinning carousel and can roll balls to each other and do half a dozen other guided activities that bring the Coriolis effect to life. A scanning tunneling microscope demo produced a 3D atom-by-atom map of the surface of a graphite (carbon) crystal and brought nanotechnology to life.

Another demonstration showed visitors how increased atmospheric CO2 enhances the greenhouse effect by decreasing the amount of infrared radiation (heat) emitted back to space.

Technorama has an interesting area called the Youth Laboratory, which houses exhibits that in general take slightly more time. Many involve measurements or experimentation with parameters or sometimes more dangerous activities (such as heating compost with a flame to determine the residual mass). In this area, school groups can reserve the lab in the morning, and general visitors are free to use the space in the afternoon. The lab also includes a kitchen lab and a chemistry lab staffed by a full-time PhD in chemistry.

This year’s special exhibition is called ‘Atomic Zoo” and will be on display through summer 2008. It includes 29 stations where visitors can experiment with real equipment and direct observation of atomic=scale phenomena.

There is a small outdoor science park which presents many opportunities for the future. Currently the park has a Boyo human yoyo, a set of coupled swings, a 5-ton rock on a swivel, and a wonderful chalet for children’s activities.

It was particularly interesting to see the distribution of visitor ages at Technorama. In comparison with the usual bimodal distribution of ages groups in many science centers (pre-teen children and their parents), there was a significantly higher percentage of teens (often on a date) and older adults (often by themselves). There were few very young children (Technorama doesn’t charge for children under 6), but instead I noticed a relatively uniform distribution of ages, with significantly more teens than one sees in most museums of this type.

Interestingly, there is little outreach from Technorama. Everything is done onsite. To date, there has been strong on-site operating support from the Swiss government, but little funding for educational outreach.

From the standpoint of educational philosophy, Technorama has strict guidelines regarding what it will put on the museum floor. First, it seeks exhibits that are purely phenomenological. Inspired by both the Exploratorium and its artists, and to to some extent by the Science Museum of Minnosota, this museum is really hands-on and proud of it.

If Technorama can’t create a real hands-on visitor experience with a phenomenon, they won’t build the exhibit. You won’t find any ball-and-stick models of molecules, touch boxes, push buttons that light up text, flip-up panels, or other types of gratuitous interactivity. In fact, there are almost no computers except where they are used for measuring/displaying a quantity. Just real phenomena.

As a result, as much as Technorama would like to develop exhibits on nanotechnology, they are playing a wait-and-see approach because of the difficulty they see in bringing real phenomena at the nanoscale to visitors without models, information panels, computer screens, or other information transfer techniques that do not present visitors with real experiences at the nanoscale. They are following NSF’s Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE) Network project very closely, along with efforts by other museums to address nanoscale science interactively.