Teknikens Hus in Lulea, Sweden

Teknikens Hus, voted the “Best Small Science Center” at the last Science Center World Congress, is a vibrant center that pays a lot of attention to its local industries and their technology.













Located on the campus of the University of Technology in Lulea, the center was conceived in 1979 by a woman who was responsible for recruiting new students. Her vision was to create a center that would show children about local industries and inspire them, particularly girls, to pursue degrees in engineering and other technical subjects at the local university.







The center has an exhibit design philosophy that is unusual, if not unique. The center’s goals are similar to most science centers and museums: to inspire interest and curiosity for science and technology. Its current director (who previously served as head of exhibits and has been with the center since before its construction) is an historian and a former theater set designer. Building on this background, the exhibits have an immersive quality that is rare, especially in a relatively small center (2,500 m2 or 25,000 SF of public space).




Once the topic for an exhibit has been selected, the three design priorities, in order, are: 1) using the real McCoy, such as a real airplane propeller that visitors can spin with a motor and adjust the pitch of the blades and feel the difference in the wind speed. Other examples include a real hydraulic log lifter that visitors can use to move around real logs (the cockpit of the machine is inside the building but the machine sticks out through the wall, and the mechanisms and logs are all outside.)

The second priority, when full size is not possible, is a working scale model, such as this papermaking machine that reproduces the main functions of a 100-m-long machine in a 10-m-long model. It uses 1.5 tonnes of pulp annually, and visitors can make a real piece of paper with it, from pulp to pressing and drying. As a nice touch at the end, Teknikens Hus provides a seal of the museum with which visitors can imprint their piece of paper. This photo shows the first of three sections of the machine, which altogether is about 10 m long.

Another example of this type of exhibit is a working, model-scale hydroelectric power plant.

The third option is a non-working model, such as a sawmill, which would be too dangerous, dusty, and noisy to do in the museum but which represents an important industry that Teknikens Hus wants to represent. All of these exhibits are sponsored by local industry, which believes that the center provides a useful opportunity for increased student awareness of technical careers. Here is the entrance to a blast furnace - another important local industry being steel, of which 250 different varieties are produced locally.

Teknikens Hus draws primarily from Lulea (70K residents) and a regional audience of 250K. Its 100K annual attendance is remarkable, and every school child in the region has had multiple experiences there by the time they have graduated from high school.




The center realizes that it must continually change its exhibits and programs to spark repeat visits and hosts 7-8 traveling exhibits annually using 2 spaces. Currently, its main temporary exhibition is called “Cold Poles, Hot Stuff”, which shows visitors what it is like to do research at the poles. This picture shows the view from the bow of an icebreaker, and small viewers on posts at the corners show video clips of wildlife that you might actually see in polar regions. As with all exhibits at Teknikens Hus, the design of the deck here uses the same materials, colors, and design as the real thing.

A small cold room lets visitors try to assemble metal parts with bulky gloves on. Puzzles let visitors put the right animals at the right pole (polar bears fit only at the North Pole, while penguins fit only at the South Pole). 2 large circular floor maps help visitors understand that the polar regions start at latitudes above 60 degrees (not just above the polar circles, and some pieces of real research hardware give visitors a sense of some of the types of research going on.

A web-based, real-time weather readout displays the current temperature (a chilling -39 deg C in one case), wind speed, and relative humidity at 2 research stations, one near each pole.

Other features of Teknikens Hus include science theater shows daily (a penguin meets a researcher, and the audience learns about the ways penguins are adapted to survive in Antarctica); a 20-seat planetarium featuring the northern lights as a backdrop, a café that serves as a mensa/cafeteria for the local university at lunchtime, and gift shop.

Teknikens Hus has a staff of 25, of which 1/3 are in the exhibits dept. This group, like several other museums, does a brisk business in exhibit manufacture and traveling exhibition rentals.

The center has several programs related to sustainability and creativity. In one program, school students work in groups to create a vision of the future, develop a project (model, PowerPoint presentation, theatrical production, exhibit) and the top entry from each of 6 science centers go annually to southern Sweden to present their vision to the other 5. Another program encourages students to invent a solution to a real problem, and entries are judged and winning entries displayed. School programs have been designed around current exhibitions, and one uses these ice core models to talk about the physics, chemistry, and biology of polar regions.

Sustainability is a theme that has appeared twice in Teknikens Hus’s traveling exhibitions. A previous exhibition, called “Grasping Climate,” is currently on display at the Nacka Natural School near Stockholm and will be described in a future post. Overall, the goals of the center are to make the public aware that climate change is happening and that everyone can do something about it. A key philosophical outlook is that even if a single individual’s action has a small effect, when adopted by everyone, the impact can be large and important.