Heureka in Vantaa, Finland

Heureka, located just north of Helsinki, packs a lot of activity into a relatively small indoor space and uses its extensive outdoor area very effectively. The center is a short, enjoyable walk from the train/bus station through a wooded area and over an artistically designed cable-stayed footbridge over a river running through the city.











Inside, Heureka has features of museums much larger. It knows that it must change exhibits frequently to maintain repeat visitation and has a good mix of permanent exhibitions, new single exhibits, and touring shows, for which it has two galleries. Some of these temporary shows are designed internally and others rented from other museums; a new exhibition developed by Heureka on shipping was just being set up while an exhibition on Mexican anthropology was in the other gallery.





The indoor exhibits were a combination of mostly original designs plus modifications of favorites found in other museums and a few purchases and trades. The use and integration of technology were some of the best I have seen. For example, a new exhibition on smart transportation systems includes an Internet-based station with 3 screens where visitors can see all of the planes in the air over North America (some 4,000 planes by the afternoon), all of the ships in the Helsinki area, and all of the city buses in Helsinki. By moving a crosshair over any given vehicle with a trackball, visitors can see, for example, a plane’s destination, flight path, number, ground speed, and height. All of these data are actually available on the Internet, but the museum, in partnership with a local university, has developed a museum-friendly interface that works very well and lets visitors experience several aspects of current transportation technology seen normally only in movies.

As another example, a nearby station in this exhibition uses 4 ceiling-mounted cameras to track the movements of visitors in the exhibition. Again, using custom software, a screen toggles between showing the movement of individual visitors and which areas receive the most amount of visitor time – something many museums have spent significant resources to do by hand. This system does it in real time and demonstrates computer vision and recognition, another powerful element of intelligent traffic systems. The floor is a huge, printed satellite image of the region, and at selected points, monitors in the floor display real-time images of intersections, and LED displays show average traffic speed.

Other indoor highlights include several geodesic-domed amphitheater areas for science shows (including one in which rats play basketball), a domed theater (which is being converted to a digital planetarium from an older 870 film projection system), a large auditorium, gift shop, and the Einstein Café, a full-service lunch facility.












The outdoor science park is large at 8,000 m2 (2 acres) and has a number of original exhibits, such as a climb-in-able Klein Bottle, a thermometer that works by measuring the expansion of long copper pipes mounted on the side of the museum, and a wind machine that lets visitors experience the force of the wind blowing at 25 m/sec (shown here).













Various water exhibits range from a human treadmill-powered Archimedian Screw to a build-it-yourself arch bridge over a small streamlet.



Other outdoor exhibits include extensive plantings, a garden of flowers organized by numbers of petals from 1 to 12, the largest rock park I have ever seen, and even a “clock garden,” in which the flowers bloom according to the time of the day.




Heureka, like many other European museums I have visited in the past several months, has a strong interest in the environment and believes that it has an important role to play in helping its visitors become more aware of global warming and to become better decision makers without dictating which specific behaviors are “best.” A series of new permanent exhibits on recycling help visitors learn about the implications of choices they make in selecting and disposing of common products, for example.





Under development is a new school program in the form of a game that is linked to their transportation exhibition and will allow teams of students to travel (virtually) between cities to perform various tasks using wireless PDAs. Throughout the game, they will have to optimize conflicts such as travel time and CO2 emissions and will receive real-time feedback on their decisions.

In this and many of their other activities and exhibits, Heureka demonstrates a strong commitment to group or family learning. Exhibits for the most part have been designed and displayed to promote group interactions, and it was clear from watching visitors that they were engaged and learning from each other as well as from the exhibits. In this exhibit, teams of visitors team up to form a virtual fireman's blanket and catch falling items in a politically corrected version of the mid-80s computer game "Bouncing Babies."

Funding-wise, Heureka obtains slightly more than 50% of its US $9 million budget from the City of Vantaa and Ministry of Education. This is in keeping with many European museums, which typically rely on earned income sources for 1/3 to ½ of their annual operating budget.

One area where Heureka differs significantly from other European science centers and museums is their use of volunteers. Whereas volunteering at a museum is rare in Europe, Heureka has about 80 active volunteers, modeling their program after U.S. museums and finding that volunteering fits in with the culture in Finland.