Techniquest, a science center located in Wales and just an hour west of Bristol (see last post), was the first re-development project in a relatively abandoned and seedy waterfront area in what at one time was the busiest port in the world (due to shipments of coal, which was mined nearby and shipped internationally from Cardiff).
The adjacent area has become decidedly posh, with new restaurants and clubs and plenty of shopping for tourists. The seat of the Welsh government is only 500 m distant.In designing its building, Techniquest took the footprint and structural steel frame of an abandoned shipyard facility. One long wall to the south is glass, which gives the exhibits natural lighting and a visitor-friendly atmosphere.
The exhibits are highly interactive and are developed and built in-house, with bright colors and a style that is unlike most other museums. Although the exhibit cases look as if they are made of plastic, they are for the most part wood, built up in layers of plywood and mostly shaped by a computer-driven router. Techniquest has almost a dozen exhibit staff, and most are employed in building exhibits for other museums around the world in addition to their own projects. 
Some of the exhibits are clever modifications of old favorites. For example, this Hand Battery exhibit is very user-friendly and includes 8 different metals (in comparison with the usual 3). But in spite of this potential complexity, the physical design makes it easy to see what to do and visitors quickly get it.
The center places a high value on personal contact with visitors thru science shows and has 3 presentation venues: 1) a 100-seat amphitheater, 2) a 25-seat planetarium, and 3) a flexible lab/project room shown here. The amphitheater is used for 3-4 shows per day on the weekends, while the planetarium runs 7-8 shows daily. Although there are now almost 30 different planetarium shows (all written in-house), all end with a brief display of the night sky of that day, so that visitors can go home and look for certain constellations or other astronomical objects if the skies are clear. The lab is also well used and can be set up for chemical extractions, physics, or a number of other activities for school or family groups.
The center believes that it should be reaching every person in Wales and has aggressively set up satellites in other corners of the country to serve as hubs for outreach. They currently estimate that they provide an average of about 10 minutes of science experience per person per year in the country and plan to build this over time towards at least an hour. This exhibition on music is an effort to reach new audiences and has been relatively successful in bringing in more teens to Techniquest.
Techniquest has begun a major new initiative related to the science of sustainability and climate change. Following David Attenborough’s recent lead, the center has made it a top priority and is working toward the day when one-quarter of its exhibits and programming are related to sustainability. During the past summer, climate change was the theme for much of their programming and they created a series of temporary exhibits and activities to help visitors become more aware of the issue, including a huge outdoor world map with a facilitated activity on how far your food travels. The energy related to globally vs. locally sourced food is a common theme in European science centers; one used frequently among centers working on visitor awareness of climate change. The exhibit has now been largely dismantled, but this kiosk and a few other exhibits remain; here you can see a fully sealed biological system which has been operating without anything but light and heat for several years. It is used primarily as a prop for explainers in talking with visitors about the interconnections in an ecosystem.
Perhaps most importantly, the director and staff of the center have made a strong commitment to global warming as a critical issue facing the world of the future and one around which they plan to commit significant programmatic resources. The next phase is a proposal to a major foundation to develop a series of permanent outdoor exhibits and related programming on the topic of climate change.
2 comments:
Hello Charlie,
I just discovered your blog, and I am very pleased to have done so.
Sorry, in the middle of my previous comment, I was going to see if I could sign in from my WordPress account so you could see my post with a link to your post about Techniquest, and I hit Publish instead!
I am so pleased you are blogging your way round European museums to see how they cover climate change, as I track this too, from a British-Californian standpoint.
There's another site in Britain that I wish had an equivalent Stateside, and that is The Eden Project right down south-west in Cornwall. It is well worth the trek if you have time and are willing to explore a site that is not a museum, but is world-class and may provide ideas that city-central museums cannot. Eden has an education brief and stands out as being on top of sustainable, climate-friendly topics and how to present complex issues to the public in a natural environment—a disused china clay quarry now converted to present climatic biomes that are absolutely amazing.
This is from the Eden website:
"Eden is all about man's relationship with and dependence upon plants. Much of our food, our clothes, our shelter and our medicines come from the plant world. Without plants there would be no oxygen for us to breathe, no life on earth.
The Eden Project is a showcase for all the questions and many of the answers. But Eden is not a worthy, over-serious, guilt-ridden place; nor does it preach. It is about education and communication of the major environmental issues of the day, always presented in an engaging, involving, even humorous way."
Post a Comment